Top 10 AI Receptionists for Home Services 2026:#1 Frenchy Digital

A furnace quits at 2 a.m. in January. The homeowner has a toddler, a cold house and your number from the sticker on the unit. What happens in the next ninety seconds decides whether you get the job, and it has nothing to do with how natural your AI receptionist sounds.

It depends on three boring things. Does the call get recognized as an emergency? Does it reach whoever is on call tonight, not the office line that nobody answers? And does the job land in ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro or Jobber so the tech isn't driving to an address written on a napkin?

That's why I didn't reuse our general ranking for this. Our 10 best AI receptionist companies scored things a law office or a clinic cares about, like BAAs and free trials. A contractor cares about different things. So on September 30, 2026 I went back through the public pages of every AI receptionist I could verify for HVAC, plumbing and electrical, and scored ten of them on six attributes that matter in the trades.

The wrong model most owners bring to this is that an AI receptionist is a phone product. It isn't, really. In the trades it's a dispatcher that happens to talk. The right question isn't "does it sound human?" but "would I trust it with the on-call rota?" Therefore the ranking scores the dispatch half and refuses to score the voice half.

Six attributes, two points each, twelve points maximum, all taken from the vendor's own public pages or marketplace listings on September 30, 2026.Here's the rubric, printed before the results so you can argue with it first.

Ties go to the lower published entry price, then alphabetical order. A vendor that publishes no price loses that tie-break to one that does. Blunt, yes, but you can see it.

Who we left out.Rilla is sales coaching for technicians in the home, not an answering product. Probook optimizes dispatch but doesn't answer the phone. Goodcall's pricing page names no field service software, only Zapier. My AI Front Desk publishes a clear price ($99 a month for 200 minutes on its pricing page) but reaches FSM tools through Zapier, so it sits just outside the ten as an alternate. Netic, Hatch, Rosie, Dialzara and AnswerForce weren't researched in this pass, and I won't score what I didn't check.

How to re-check.Every score traces to a URL in the sources list. Pricing and help pages change without notice, and a marketplace listing can disappear in a week. If you're about to sign, screenshot the page that day and keep it with the contract.

To be clear about the limit of this: a 12 means a vendor tells you a lot before you sign. It does not mean the agent handles a panicked caller well at 2 a.m. You only learn that by calling it, which is why the closing section is a test plan.

Jobber's Receptionist was the only product to earn all twelve points; Smith.ai and Sameday tied at eleven, with Smith.ai ahead on its $0 entry plan.

Scores reflect public vendor pages and marketplace listings checked September 30, 2026. A zero means the attribute wasn't documented where we looked, not that the vendor can't do it.

Two things jump out. First, the pricing column is where the field falls apart. Six of ten publish no price at all, and that includes three of the four FSM companies selling their own receptionist. Jobber is the exception, and it's a big part of why it wins.

Second, the emergency column is where the products differ most in substance. It's easy to publish "24/7". It's harder to write down how a burst pipe is told apart from a dripping tap, and who gets the call. Two of the ten document nothing on that at all.

Four ties needed breaking at 9 points. Upfirst publishes a price, so it goes first. Avoca, Broccoli AI and ServiceTitan publish none, so they're in alphabetical order. The same rule puts LeadTruffle ahead of Workiz at 8.

Each cell is what the vendor's page or marketplace listing said on September 30, 2026, or "not publicly disclosed".We didn't test any integration ourselves; these are documented claims, and the difference matters.

Sources are listed at the bottom. Smith.ai's ServiceTitan scheduling claim comes from its May 29, 2025 announcement rather than its integration page, which lists customer matching and notes. Avoca and Broccoli AI booking claims come from their ServiceTitan Marketplace listings.

Read the billing units before you read the prices. Jobber bills per conversation. Smith.ai and Upfirst bill per call. Sameday bills per minute. A per-minute plan feels cheap until your average call runs long because every caller wants to describe the noise the unit is making, and in the trades, they do.

Here's each vendor in rank order, what earned its score, what cost it points, and who it suits. The downside sits next to the upside every time, because nobody else will put it there for you.

Top ranked

1

Jobber

12 out of 12

4.8/ 5 on App Store (Jobber app) (21,074 reviews)

Jobber's Receptionist is the rare product that answers every question on public pages. The Jobber help article says it costs $29 a month with 30 conversations included and $0.79 per additional one, and it's included with unlimited usage on the Plus plan. Spam and calls with no conversation don't count against you.

It books through your Jobber Online Booking form, so jobs land in the calendar you already dispatch from. You set trigger terms such as "emergency" or "urgent", and the feature page gives trade examples like no heat and burst pipe. A matching call is transferred to your escalation contact immediately, or sends a text instead. Business hours get their own greeting, and you can drop the live transfer option after hours.

One detail I liked: the help article says the escalation number must differ from your business number, or the transfer won't work properly. That's the kind of thing you only write down after someone's call looped back to itself.

Who it suits: any shop already on Jobber, especially on Plus. The downside:it's Jobber only. If you run ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro, this is not an option, and switching FSM to get a receptionist is the tail wagging the dog.

Visit Jobber App Store Google Play

2

Smith.ai

11 out of 12

Smith.ai is the only product on this list that explicitly documents safety screening. Its home services page says the AI screens calls against safety criteria for gas leaks, electrical hazards and flooding, and escalates. That is exactly the triage a contractor needs, written down.

Pricing is public: per the AI Receptionist pricing page, a Free plan covers 25 calls a month with extra calls at $3, Pro starts at $150 a month for 75 calls (extra calls $2.50 down to $2.17 on higher tiers), and Enterprise starts at $500. Transfer to Smith.ai's live agents is documented on the paid plans.

It lost one point on integrations. ServiceTitan is the only field service platform Smith.ai names, and the scheduling capability comes from a May 29, 2025 blog post saying the AI Receptionist can book through ServiceTitan's Scheduling Pro.

Who it suits: ServiceTitan shops that want a human backstop behind the AI. The downside:per-call pricing adds up fast in peak season, and if you're on Housecall Pro or Jobber you'll be relying on generic connectors rather than a named integration.

Visit Smith.ai

3

Sameday

11 out of 12

Sameday is built for the trades and reads like it. The HVAC page says it recognizes urgent no-heat and no-cooling calls, follows your dispatch rules and can transfer true emergencies to your on-call technician, 24/7, including nights, weekends and holidays.

Its Housecall Pro integration page says jobs land on your Housecall Pro schedule in real time, and names ServiceTitan, Jobber, Service Fusion and FieldRoutes as well. That breadth is its strongest card.

It dropped a point on pricing: the pricing page shows Launch at $449 a month for 500 minutes and Scale at $789 for 1,000, but no overage rate. The entry price is also the highest published on this list by a wide margin, which is why Smith.ai wins the tie.

Who it suits: multi-truck HVAC and plumbing shops that want trade-specific dispatch logic across mainstream FSMs. The downside: $449 is a lot for a two-van operation, and you should get the overage rate in writing before your first cold snap.

Visit Sameday

4

Housecall Pro

10 out of 12

4.6/ 5 on App Store (Housecall Pro app) (30,367 reviews)

Housecall Pro's CSR AI is the native receptionist for Housecall Pro users. The CSR AI help article says it schedules new appointments directly onto your calendar while checking technician availability, has dedicated after-hours settings, and that emergency handling is always on, with a call forward or a text alert.

Human handoff is documented three ways: forward to a number, pass to a Housecall Pro Assist agent, or end the call with notes. That's a clearer menu than most.

It scored zero on pricing because the pricing page didn't publish the add-on price when I checked. The base plans on annual billing showed Basic at $59, Essentials at $149 and Max at $299 a month. Our sibling article quoted $79, $189 and $329 on September 2, which looks like monthly billing; ask which basis you're being quoted.

Who it suits: Housecall Pro shops that want the least integration risk. The downside:you can't budget it without a sales call, and it only exists inside Housecall Pro.

Visit Housecall Pro App Store Google Play

5

Upfirst

9 out of 12

Upfirst has the cheapest published way in and the clearest pricing ladder. The pricing page shows Starter at $24.95 for 30 calls ($1.50 per extra call), Premium at $59.95 for 90, Pro at $159.95 for 300 and Scale at $299 for 600, with the overage dropping to $0.70. It documents a live, warm handoff.

Its HVAC page says it routes urgent calls to your on-call technician immediately, around the clock.

The weak spot is the FSM. That same page says ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and Jobber connect through Zapier, while its native integrations are Google, Outlook, Acuity and Calendly. So it books into a calendar, not documented into your dispatch board. One third-party roundup calls its ServiceTitan link native; Upfirst's own page says Zapier, and I believe the vendor over the roundup.

Who it suits: solo operators and small shops that live in Google Calendar. The downside: a Zapier hop between the call and the dispatch board is one more place a job can go missing.

Visit Upfirst

6

Avoca

9 out of 12

Avoca has the most detailed on-call routing I found. A help article explains that it syncs ServiceTitan on-call shifts and routes by round-robin or to the nearest on-call tech by ZIP code. That's real dispatch logic, not a forwarding number.

Its ServiceTitan Marketplace listing says it books jobs directly back into ServiceTitan and answers 24/7. The HVAC page shows a late-night gas smell call routed to a tech and describes transfers that pass the caller's context to your CSR.

It lost a point because ServiceTitan is the only FSM it names, and two because no price is published.

Who it suits: larger ServiceTitan shops with a real on-call rota. The downside: ServiceTitan only, and sales-led pricing.

Visit Avoca

7

Broccoli AI

9 out of 12

Broccoli's home page says it works with ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro, dispatches the on-call tech for emergencies and is available 24/7. Its ServiceTitan Marketplace listing says it books jobs directly into ServiceTitan's dispatch.

It got one point on transfer: the page says it transfers calls, but I found no documented rule for when or to whom. No price is published.

Who it suits: ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro shops that want a trade-specific agent. The downside:the escalation logic is undocumented, so you'll have to test it yourself rather than read it.

Visit Broccoli AI

8

ServiceTitan

9 out of 12

2.9/ 5 on App Store (ServiceTitan Mobile app) (1,654 reviews)

ServiceTitan's AI Voice Agents live inside Contact Center Pro. The voice agents page says they book to the dispatch board with real-time knowledge of technician availability and can recognize when a live human is needed and transfer.

The most useful document is a release note on multi-point escalation. Its example is a plumbing customer calling after hours about a burst pipe: the agent tries the on-call office number, gets no answer, then tries the owner's cell. Before this, unanswered escalations went to voicemail.

I gave emergency rules one point because the routing is documented but the recognition isn't: I didn't find published keywords or criteria for what the agent treats as an emergency. Pricing isn't published.

Who it suits: shops already paying for Contact Center Pro. The downside:it's an add-on to an add-on, priced by sales, and multi-point escalation has to be switched on by support.

Visit ServiceTitan App Store Google Play

9

LeadTruffle

8 out of 12

LeadTruffle (whose domain now redirects from .com to .co) names Jobber, Housecall Pro and Workiz on its pricing page, alongside AI CRM booking integrations, 24/7 AI voice answering and AI call transfer. A Jobber App Marketplace listing describes booking jobs in Jobber from real-time availability; that page blocked our fetcher, so I'm relying on the search result for it.

It scored zero on emergency rules, because I found nothing documented, and zero on pricing, because the page says pricing is sales-led. A third-party directory prints a monthly figure; that isn't the vendor's price, so I don't repeat it.

Who it suits: Jobber, Housecall Pro or Workiz shops focused on lead capture from calls and texts. The downside: you must define emergency behaviour yourself and confirm it in a test.

Visit LeadTruffle

10

Workiz

8 out of 12

Workiz Genius Answering (the agent Workiz calls Jessica) is native to Workiz. The Workiz Genius page says calls are converted directly into jobs scheduled within Workiz, it answers 24/7 and it routes calls to team members.

No emergency rules are documented and no price is published. A Workiz help article (blocked to our fetcher, seen in search) indicates that calls transferred to external numbers leave the answering flow without a transcript. For an emergency forward to an on-call mobile, that's the detail I'd test first.

Who it suits: Workiz shops that want native booking. The downside: the least documented emergency path in the ten.

Visit Workiz

The single most important setting in a home services AI receptionist is the rule that decides what counts as an emergency, and who gets woken up. Everything else is booking.

Think about it like a hospital triage nurse rather than a receptionist. The nurse's job isn't to be pleasant. It's to sort the chest pain from the sprained ankle in thirty seconds and send each to the right place. An AI receptionist in the trades is doing the same sort, on a much smaller menu.

The ten products document that sort in three different ways. Some use trigger words: Jobber lets you add terms like emergency, and its feature page mentions no heat and burst pipe. Some use criteria: Smith.ai screens for gas leaks, electrical hazards and flooding. Some use your own dispatch rules: Sameday says it follows yours, and Avoca syncs the on-call shift from ServiceTitan.

Keywords are easy to set and easy to fool. A caller who says "there's water everywhere" never said "burst pipe". Criteria are better, if you can see them. Dispatch rules tied to your rota are best, because they route to a person who is actually on shift tonight.

Here's the boundary table I'd start from. Adjust it for your trade and your insurer, but don't launch without one.

Electrical calls need their own line in that table. A sparking panel or a burning smell is a fire risk before it's a service call. The receptionist shouldn't coach anyone near live equipment, and it should say 911 if there's smoke or flame.

And test the forward itself. Workiz's note about transfers leaving the flow, and Jobber's note that the escalation number must differ from the business line, both describe ways a perfectly recognized emergency can still land nowhere.

Every vendor here says 24/7. What differs is what happens to the call at 11 p.m. once it's answered.

There are really three after-hours outcomes, and you should decide in advance which call types get which. The call gets booked for tomorrow. The call gets a text alert to someone on call. Or the call gets a live transfer that rings a human phone right now.

Jobber supports a separate after-hours greeting and lets you remove live transfer after hours. Housecall Pro has dedicated after-hours settings. ServiceTitan's multi-point escalation tries a chain of numbers in order, with a ring time for each. Avoca picks the on-call tech from the ServiceTitan shift, even the nearest one by ZIP.

The arithmetic of a transfer chain is worth doing out loud. Say you set 25 seconds of ringing per number and chain three numbers: office line, on-call tech, owner. Worst case, the caller waits 75 seconds plus the agent's own handover talk before reaching a person. That's fine for a burst pipe if it ends with a human; it's a problem if the last number goes to voicemail. So always end the chain with a text alert and a callback promise, not silence.

One more thing from real life: holidays. Your on-call rota around Thanksgiving and Christmas is rarely the normal rota. If the receptionist reads on-call from your FSM, update it there. If it reads a static number from its own settings, somebody has to remember to change it, and somebody usually doesn't.

Which FSM you run narrows this list faster than any other factor.Here's the short version by platform.

• ServiceTitan: Native AI Voice Agents in Contact Center Pro. Marketplace-listed third parties: Avoca and Broccoli AI, both documenting booking into ServiceTitan. Smith.ai documents scheduling through Scheduling Pro. Sameday names ServiceTitan. Upfirst uses Zapier.
• Housecall Pro: Native CSR AI. Sameday documents real-time scheduling onto Housecall Pro. Broccoli AI and LeadTruffle name it. Housecall Pro's Open API is on the Max plan only, which matters for any custom build.
• Jobber: Native Receptionist, the only native option with a published price. LeadTruffle has a Jobber App Marketplace listing and Sameday names Jobber. Upfirst uses Zapier.
• Workiz: Native Genius Answering. LeadTruffle names Workiz among its integrations.

A native receptionist has one structural advantage: it sees the same schedule the dispatcher sees, with no sync lag. A third party has one structural advantage: you can keep it if you ever change FSM. Which matters more depends on how settled you are in your software.

A marketplace listing means more than a logo on a vendor page. ServiceTitan's App Marketplace program guide describes a multi-stage certification, including an evaluation call, a data and API questionnaire, sandbox work and a final review, plus annual recertification. That's why I weighed Avoca's and Broccoli's listings as documentation.

For prices across the wider category, including products that aren't trade-specific, our AI receptionist pricing comparison lays out twelve vendors by billing unit. And if you're weighing agents beyond the phone (quoting, follow-up, review requests), our guide to the top AI agents for home service contractors covers that wider set. One correction to that article: it listed the Jobber Receptionist price as unresolved. Jobber's own help center now settles it at $29 a month for 30 conversations.

The home services phone market runs on a handful of missed-call statistics, and I couldn't trace any of them to a method I'd defend.So they're named here and refused, rather than quietly used.

• The Invoca unanswered-call share and the per-missed-call dollar figure: Invoca's blog post on missed home services calls states a share of unanswered calls as 'our research' with no sample, method or date. The dollar-per-missed-call figure that circulates with it does not appear on that page, which only walks through an illustrative furnace job. We refuse both.
• The 'answer only two thirds but believe nearly all' report: It circulates through answering-service vendor blogs attributed to a 2019 lead-generation company report. We could not locate the original report, so we refuse it.
• Unanswered-call studies from call-tracking and directory vendors: Several vendor-marketing studies publish a percentage of contractor calls that went unanswered. We could not trace their methods, and we refuse them.
• Vendor booking rates, revenue lifts and autonomy percentages: Several of the ranked vendors publish booking rates or percentage lifts about themselves. They are vendor-published with no independent test, so none are printed or scored here.

If you want to know what missed calls cost your shop, pull your own phone logs for a month. That number is yours, it's true, and no vendor can argue with it.

Answering calls with AI is low risk; calling people with AI is not. The FCC's Declaratory Ruling FCC 24-17, adopted February 2, 2024, found that the TCPA's rules on artificial or prerecorded voice cover AI-generated voices. Outbound AI calls generally need prior express consent unless an emergency purpose or exemption applies.

That matters here because several of these products also chase estimates or follow up on leads by phone. Check your consent records before you switch that on.

Disclosure is the second point. Utah's AI law, as amended in 2025 and summarized by Davis Polk, requires disclosure when a consumer clearly asks, and up-front disclosure for regulated occupations only in high-risk interactions. Licensed trades are regulated occupations in Utah, but a service booking is unlikely to meet the high-risk definition; that's my reading, not a ruling. The easy answer everywhere is to have the agent say it's AI in its greeting. I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice.

Most of what goes wrong with these products is visible in the sales call, if you ask.These are the red flags I'd walk away over.

• They can't show you the emergency rule: If the vendor can't show where you define what counts as an emergency and who gets it, the answer is probably 'whoever you typed into one forwarding field'.
• Integration means Zapier, but the deck says native: Ask whether jobs are written into your FSM schedule directly, and which fields come across. A Zap is fine if you know it's a Zap.
• No overage rate in writing: Your peak season is when overage bites. Get the per-minute or per-call rate beyond the allowance before you sign.
• Booking rates quoted as proof: A vendor's own booking rate is marketing. Ask for a trial on your own number instead.
• Transfers that drop the transcript: If the on-call tech picks up with no idea what the caller said, you've paid for a slower voicemail.
• No gas or electrical safety script: If they have never thought about a gas smell call, they have not built for your trade.

For the same questions applied to any agent vendor, including custom builders like us, our AI agent developer red flags checklist goes deeper.

Frenchy Digital is my company. That's a conflict of interest, which is why this pick sits outside the scored list and is labelled as mine.

So here it is on the same rubric, and it doesn't flatter us. FSM named: 1. We have no listing on the ServiceTitan, Jobber or Housecall Pro marketplaces, and our AI receptionist page names no FSM. We build against whatever API you have, but ServiceTitan gates developer access and certifies marketplace apps, Jobber approves custom integrations, and Housecall Pro keeps its Open API on the Max plan.

Booking write-back: 1. Our page says the agent books against a live calendar through deterministic code, not by the model guessing. Writing into a specific FSM is buildable, but it's not a documented, shipped connector. Emergency rules: 1. Our emergency and handover rules are written with you during discovery, and nothing trade-specific is published. After-hours: 1. Software runs all night, but the rubric scores documentation, and our page doesn't document on-call paging.

Pricing: 2. We publish it: $5,000 for the agent plus $5,000 for setup, so $10,000 initial, rising with complexity and the number of integrations. Then $2,500 a month, with model, telephony and API usage paid directly at provider rates. Year one works out to $40,000 plus usage, later years $30,000 plus usage. Human transfer: 2. The agent says it's AI, and hands over with the conversation carried when it doesn't know.

That's 8 of 12. It ties LeadTruffle and Workiz, and because we publish a price and they don't, the tie-break would put us 9th of eleven. Not first. Not close.

So why is it my pick? Because the rubric measures what's documented out of the box, and a custom build is, by definition, not out of the box. The case for us is fit: one agent across your whole stack (phones, FSM, CRM, quoting), your own emergency and escalation logic written for your trade and your rota, and full source code and IP that you own. We've been building since 2016, with our US company since 2019. You get a fixed-price phased proposal within 5 business days and a 30-day post-launch warranty.

To be clear about evidence: we have not shipped a receptionist for a home services client, and I won't describe an outcome we haven't measured. Take this as a scenario. A four-truck HVAC and plumbing shop on ServiceTitan, with a separate quoting tool and an on-call rota on a spreadsheet, wants one agent that pages the right tech and writes the job back. That's a custom build, and the price starts at $10,000 before integrations add to it.

Take a shop fielding 150 conversations a month and run the published numbers. This is arithmetic from the pricing pages, not a quote.

Jobber: $29 covers 30, so 120 extra at $0.79 is about $95, for roughly $124 a month (or included if you're on Plus). Upfirst: Pro at $159.95 covers 300 calls, so you'd likely sit on Premium ($59.95 for 90) plus 60 extra at $1.00, about $120. Smith.ai: Pro starts at $150 for 75 calls, plus extra calls at up to $2.50, so a little over $330 if billed at the top overage. Sameday: $449 for 500 minutes, which covers 150 calls averaging just over three minutes.

So the spread at the same volume runs from about $120 to $449, roughly a 3.7x difference. What you're paying for across that range is mostly depth of dispatch logic and FSM coverage, not the voice. And the four products with no price can't be placed on this line at all, which is itself useful information.

For how this compares with a staffed front desk, the AI vs human receptionist cost breakdown does the full calculation.

This ranking measures disclosure and documented behaviour, not call quality.Here's what I couldn't check.

• No hands-on testing: We did not place test calls into any of the ten or verify any integration in a live FSM account. Every score is what the vendor documents.
• Blocked pages: The Workiz help center, the Jobber App Marketplace listing for LeadTruffle and Jobber's developer docs blocked our fetcher. Where we relied on a search result for those pages, the text says so.
• A point in time: Every page was checked on September 30, 2026. Prices and features in this category change monthly.
• Not every vendor: Netic, Hatch, Rosie, Dialzara and AnswerForce were not researched in this pass and may deserve a place.
• Our own score: We scored ourselves, which is a conflict. We applied the same rubric and published the reasoning so you can mark it down if you disagree.

• Write your emergency list on one page: which calls wake someone up, who is on call each night this month, and the exact gas and electrical safety lines you want read out.
• Pick the two products that fit your FSM from the section above, and start trials on the plan you would actually buy.
• Call each one after hours from your own mobile with five scripts (no heat, burst pipe, gas smell, tune-up, price shopper), then check your on-call phone, the transcript and the job in your FSM.

Whichever passes the gas smell test, keep. Whichever doesn't, cancel before the trial ends.