polite.ai answers the phone with teams of AI agents created by describing what should happen — no prompt engineering, no integration project, no telecoms knowledge. The strategy for how your AIs and humans should work together to delight your customers is explored in a chat; the Builder designs the agents, wires the handoffs and interactions, and puts it all live on real phone numbers.
The pieces
- Agents and teams - an agent is one AI with a job: answering as the front desk, taking bookings, qualifying callers. Agents work in teams: a receptionist can hand a caller to a specialist, bring in a human, or quietly ask a colleague agent to look something up mid-call.
- The Builder - where teams are made: chat with an agent to design the team, watch its structure being built live on screen as you go. Teams are tested in the browser, then published with Go live — see Meet the Builder.
- Numbers - agents answer real phone calls on numbers bought in the dashboard, or on numbers an organisation already owns. Browser calling works without any number at all.
- Knowledge - agents answer from the organisation's website and documents, so they talk about the actual business, not generalities. See Knowledge bases.
- Calls - every call keeps its recording, transcript, and a feed of what the agent actually did, any call can be inspected after the fact.
- Credit - calling is prepaid per minute — on the models the Builder defaults to, one rate covers the AI model, the voice and the telephony. When credit runs out, calls stop — an account can never owe money.
What agents can do on a call
Answer and greet callers as specified. Take real calendar bookings, and let callers move or cancel them. Transfer to the team, transfers to humans, including warm transfers where the agent briefs the human first, and take the call back afterwards to finish the administrative tasks. Email a summary of every captured call to the team. Read and act on the organisation's knowledge. Accept keypad input when it is better for accuracy. Place outbound calls where enabled.
What they strive to do
Politeness and joy are the product. Robust and transparent use of language AI is the foundation. Every agent discloses that it is an AI and hands over to a human the moment that is the better answer. The full set of guarantees is in What every agent promises your callers.
The demo number on the polite.ai home page is answered by a polite.ai agent — it explains the product and can add a caller to the waitlist by voice.
Under the hood
The platform core is open source (MIT) and the full editor and API sit underneath the Builder, so nothing built here is locked in — see Open source & no lock-in. The practical starting point is the Quickstart.