Trust

Responsible AI

What our system will not do, what it cannot do, and where a person stays in the loop.

Why this page exists

We are asking Australian businesses to let software answer their phone. That is a reasonable thing to be careful about, and most of the questions worth asking are ones a sales page will not answer. So they are answered here, in one place, including the parts that are not flattering.

A person is always accountable

The AI answers calls. It does not run your business. Every rule it follows is one you gave us and approved, and it does not go on your live number until you have signed it off. Setup and tuning are done by people here, not by handing you a login and wishing you luck.

The calls that need a person still go to a person. That is what the handover rules are for, and you set them.

It cannot call 000

A hello247 number cannot be used to reach emergency services and is not a replacement for a standard telephone service. Anyone who needs police, fire or ambulance must dial 000 from a mobile or fixed line.

The receptionist can be configured to treat certain calls as urgent for your business and escalate them to your people immediately. That is a business escalation rule. It is not an emergency service and must not be relied on as one. If your business takes calls from people who may be in danger, this limit needs to be part of how you brief your staff and your customers, not a line in a contract nobody reads.

What it will not do

These are configured limits, not aspirations, and they apply to every account.

• Invent information. If it does not know, it says so and hands over. It is set up not to fill a gap with a guess.
• Act outside your rules. It cannot decide to offer a discount, commit to a date, or agree to something you have not authorised.
• Give professional advice — legal, financial, medical or otherwise — unless you have explicitly configured it to and it is appropriate. An accountant’s receptionist does not give tax advice.
• Pretend to be certain. It is built to say when it is unsure rather than sound confident and be wrong.
• Replace judgement. Calls that need a person go to a person.

The industry pages set out the extra limits that apply in specific trades — what a plumber’s receptionist must never say about gas, what an agency’s must never say about price, what an allied health practice’s must never go near.

It can still be wrong

The responses are generated, not retrieved from a script, and generated text can be wrong or incomplete even with good rules behind it. We reduce that by narrowing what it is allowed to do and by handing over rather than guessing — but we are not going to tell you it cannot happen.

What we do about it: anything it could not answer is reported back so the gap gets closed, every call produces a written transcript so you can see exactly what was said, and if it gets something wrong we want to hear about it. That is what tuning is.

Callers are talking to a machine, and we do not hide it

We do not build receptionists that claim to be human, and we will not configure one to pretend. If a caller asks, it answers honestly. Voices are licensed synthetic voices, not impersonations of real people, and we will not clone a specific person’s voice.

Recording, transcripts and consent

A written transcript is produced for every call, so we can capture the enquiry and send you the message. We do not record call audio, and there is no setting that turns it on. If we offer recording later, it will be off by default and the caller will be told whenever it is on.

Recording law is set by state, not nationally. New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia require every party to a conversation to consent. Victoria and Queensland do not extend the prohibition to someone taking part in the call. We configure your setup for where you and your callers are, and we would rather over-announce than under-announce. You remain responsible for the consents that apply to your business — we cannot give them on your behalf.

Retention, and exactly what is kept, is on the Security & data residency page.

Where the processing happens

Your records are stored in Australia, in Sydney, and your caller’s audio never leaves the country — speech-to-text is done by a specialist provider on its Australian endpoint, in a Sydney data centre. Two parts of a call do use specialist providers outside Australia: the language model that works out what to say, and the voice that speaks it. The text of the conversation passes through both.

We could have written “your data stays in Australia” and left it there. It would have been easier to sell and it would not have been true. The full picture, provider by provider, is on the security page.

What we will not claim

There are no customer testimonials on this website, because we do not yet have customers who have agreed to give one. There are no case studies with invented numbers, no statistics we cannot source, and no stock photographs of people presented as our team or our clients.

When there is proof worth showing, it will be real and it will be attributed. Until then the absence is deliberate, and you should treat any AI vendor differently if theirs is not.

Tell us when it gets it wrong

If the receptionist said something it should not have, or missed something it should have caught, email hello@hello247.com.au with the time of the call. We will pull the transcript, tell you what happened, and fix the configuration. If you believe you have found a security issue, the same address reaches us.

This page is kept current as the system changes. If something here no longer matches what the product does, that is a bug and we want to know.