Design a Voice and Chat AI Receptionist Platform

Design a customer-facing AI receptionist platform for businesses. Customers can call a business phone number or contact it through chat on a website, mobile application, or supported messaging channel. The receptionist answers using business-approved information, performs permitted actions, and transfers the customer to a human when needed.

Constraints & Assumptions

• Different businesses and industries require configurable behavior and approved knowledge.
• Preserve tenant isolation and distinguish answering a question from executing an action.
• A human handoff must transfer control of the live conversation, not merely suggest that the customer contact someone else.
• Define an initial scope before choosing traffic or latency targets; none are supplied.

Clarifying Questions to Ask

• Which actions are allowed, and which require customer confirmation or human approval?
• How are business knowledge, policies, hours, and escalation contacts approved and updated?
• Does each business have a staffed agent queue, and what happens outside its available hours?
• Must voice and chat share conversation history across channels?

Part 1 — Channels and conversation state

Describe voice and chat ingress, identity, session state, and response delivery.

What This Part Should Cover

• Channel adapters and a shared conversation model without losing channel-specific timing behavior.
• Tenant routing and authorized customer context.
• Voice transcription/synthesis, interruption, and partial-message handling.

Part 2 — Knowledge, configuration, and actions

Explain how the platform uses approved information and executes only permitted operations.

What This Part Should Cover

• Versioned business configuration and permission-aware retrieval.
• Grounding, uncertainty, content-quality evaluation, and unsupported requests.
• Typed action contracts, authorization, confirmation, idempotency, and audit.

Part 3 — Human takeover

Walk through escalation, agent assignment, transcript/context delivery, and transfer of response authority.

What This Part Should Cover

• A real agent queue and an atomic ownership transition.
• Voice bridging or chat routing after acceptance.
• Prevention of simultaneous bot and human replies and behavior when no human is available.