For most small businesses, Hello22 AI is the better choice. You pay one flat price each month, so your bill does not jump when you get busy. Setup takes minutes, not a call with a sales team. Smith.ai is the better choice if you need a real human to pick up sensitive calls, like legal or medical intake, and you can afford to pay per call. 

Here is the problem both tools are trying to fix. Your phone still rings even when you are on a job, driving, or asleep. Many times, the scenario is such that nobody answers and the caller does not leave a voicemail. They ring the next business on the list. If you evaluate it over a month, that is a lot of lost work. And you never see it happen, because a missed call leaves no trace. 

This guide compares Hello22 AI and Smith.ai in detail. We look at what each one does, what it really costs, how long a setup takes, and who each one suits. Prices are referenced from each company’s own pricing page, and in this article, we compare these two on various factors like pricing and features, suitability, time to go online, and more.

What Does an AI Receptionist Actually Do? 

AI receptionist is software that answers your business phone. It is not a menu or IVR that says, “press 1 for sales”. It talks like a person. 

It does four main jobs: 

1. Responding to the call. Every time. Day, night, weekend, and public holidays. 

2. Answer questions. Your opening hours, your prices, what you do, where you are. 

3. Works out if the caller is worth your time. It asks a few questions and takes their details. 

4. Book the appointment. The AI receptionist completes the conversation and sends take-appointment details straight into your calendar while the caller is still on the phone. 

Then it sends you a summary,,, so you know what happened. 

The reason this matterter is simple. Most small businesses are not losing customers because of bad service, but they are losing them because nobody picked up.

Hello22 AI vs Smith.ai: Quick Comparison 

Comparison	Hello22 AI	Smith AI
Who answers	AI voice agent (passing the call to human feature coming soon)	AI first, with option to pass to a human
Pricing style	Flat monthly fee	Per call
Starting price	AUD $49/month	$0 free plan, then $150/month (AI)
Human plans	Not offered	$300/month for 30 calls and up
What you get	200 call minutes on every plan	25 to 1,000+ calls depending on plan
Cost of extra calls	Overage on minutes	About $1.50–$3.00 (AI) or $8.50–$11.50 (human)
Setup	Paste your website link, or type details in	Onboarding with their team
Time to go live	Minutes	Days
Voices	Several to choose from	Set voice
Languages	Multilingual	English, with Spanish as a paid add-on
Free trial	7 days/10 minutes	Free plan with 25 calls
Best for	Small businesses that want a fixed monthly bill	Law firms and clinics that need human backup

How Hello22 AI Works: You Give It Your Website, It Learns Your Business 

This is the part that surprises most people, so it is worth explaining properly. 

When you sign up for Hello22 AI, you do not fill in a long form about your business. You paste it it at your website address. 

Hello22 AI, then read your website. It picks up what you do, what services you offer, your prices, your opening hours, and the questions customers usually ask. That becomes the brain behind your voice agent. When someone calls, the agent already knows the answers because it has read your site about the way a new staff member would. 

No website? That is fine. Plenty of small businesses do not have one. You can type your details in by hand instead. Your services, your hours, your prices, your common questions. It works the same way. 

And you are not stuck with your first version. You listen to real calls, spot anything the agent got wrong or did not know and add it. The agent gets better every week.  

You also get to pick up the voice. There are several to choose from, so you can match the tone to your business. A law firm and a nail salon should not sound the same. Hello22 AI is also multilingual, so it can handle callers who are more comfortable speaking another language.

The whole setup is a short journey, and your business can go live within a few minutes. 

Hello22 AI in Detail 

Hello22 AI is a 24/7 AI receptionist built in Australia, available for businesses in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and Canada. 

What it does on a call: 

• Answers every call, any time 

• Answers questions about your business 

• Books and reschedules appointments in your calendar 

• Qualifies leads and takes their details 

• Passes complex calls to your team, with context 

• Sends you a summary by WhatsApp, email or SMS 

What you get behind the scenes: call recordings, full transcripts, and a live dashboard so you can watch calls as they happen. CRM setup is included. 

Pricing (AUD, per month): 

Plan	Price	What’s included
Starter	$49	200 minutes, WhatsApp and email summaries, English voice agent, free CRM setup
Standard	$69	Everything in Starter, plus premium AI voices
Premium	$89	Everything in Standard, plus multilingual voice, SMS summaries, custom integrations

All three plans include 200 call minutes, no setup fee, no lock-in contract, and a 7-day free trial ((10 minutes). 

One honest note on the plans. The better-sounding voices sit on the Standard plan and above. If how natural your agent sounds is important to you, and for most businesses it is, start at Standard rather than Starter. The extra $20 buys the thing your callers actually notice. 

The other honest note. 200 minutes is around 65 calls a month at three minutes a call. That covers a lot of small businesses comfortably. If you take far more calls than that, check the overage rate before you sign up, so there are no surprises. 

Smith.ai in Detail 

Smith.ai is one of the renowned names in this market, and it offers something unique: people. Actual human receptionists, based in North America, available 24/7. 

Smith.ai now sells two different things, and it is easy to confuse them. 

1. The AI receptionist plans. These are priced in steps. You pick up a call volume, and the price goes up with it. 

Plan	Calls included	Price	Extra calls cost
Free	25	$0	$3.00 each
Pro	75	$150	$2.50 each
Pro	150	$270	$2.30 each
Pro	300	$500	$2.17 each
Enterprise	300	$500	$2.17 each
Enterprise	500	$800	$2.10 each
Enterprise	1,000+	Custom	Custom

Read that table carefully; the $150 Pro plan gives you 75 calls, not 300. To get 300 calls, you pay $500. Smith.ai also offers a six-month plan with rollover calls and a lower rate if you commit for longer. 

Calls are handled by AI first. If something complex comes up, the call can be passed to a live receptionist. All plans include recording, transcripts, summaries, lead qualification, call routeing, scheduling, and native integrations such as Clio and Zapier. There is also a quality studio, so you can test the agent before it goes live. 

2. The human receptionist plans: 

Plan	Price	Calls included	Extra calls
Starter	$300	30	$11.50 each
Basic	$810	90	$10.50 each
Pro	$2,100	300	$8.50 each

This setup is different, where a real person answer calls whenever needed. Another positive is that the agent will be well trained and offered by Smith.ai on its own; there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. Add-ons like CRM logging and appointment scheduling cost extra, from $0.25 to $1.50 per call. 

The Real Cost: A Side-by-Side Example 

Let’s use a real small business. A plumbing company takes 150 calls a month, averaging three minutes each. 

Option	Monthly cost	What happens
Hello22 Standard	AUD $69 base	Flat fee. You know the number before the month starts.
Smith.ai AI Pro (150 calls)	$270	The tier that fits 150 calls. Go over and each call is $2.30.
Smith.ai AI Pro (75 calls)	$337.50	$150 base, then 75 extra calls at $2.50 each. Worse value than sizing up.
Smith.ai Human Basic	$1,440	$810 base, 90 calls included, then 60 more at $10.50 each

The gap is the whole story. For the same 150 calls, you are choosing between a fixed double-digit bill and a variable four-figure one. 

Now think about a good month. You run a campaign and get 250 calls instead of 150. With Hello22 AI, your base price does not move. On Smith.ai 150-call AI plan, those 100 extra calls add $230. On the human plan, that same good month costs you another $1,050. Growth should not feel like a punishment. 

Why Hello22 AI Is the Better Fit for Most Businesses 

Smith.ai’s big selling point is that a human can pick up. That sounds like the winning argument until you look at what actually happens on the call. 

A stranger is not the same as your own team.  

When Smith.ai passes a call to a human, that person is an outsourced receptionist in a call center. They are reading your notes. They have never done your job, never visited your site, and never met your customers. Hello22 AI takes a different route: it warms transfers the call to your team, with the context from the conversation already gathered. Your own staff member knows the answer. An outsourced receptionist takes a message about it. For most small businesses, being put through to the actual business beats being put through to somebody paid to sound like it. 

Flat pricing means you can afford to answer everything.  

Here is the quiet problem with per-call billing: it makes every call a cost. When you are paying $2.30 or $10.50 each time the phone rings, you start hoping for fewer calls. That is a terrible incentive for a business trying to grow. Hello22 AI flat monthly fee removes it completely. Answer 40 calls or 140; the price on your invoice is the same, so you can market hard without watching a meter. 

High-value customers are an argument for Hello22, not against it. 

 If one client is worth $5,000, the thing that matters is that nobody gets missed, at any hour, ever. A fixed monthly cost lets you cover every call around the clock. Per-call pricing quietly pushes you towards covering fewer. 

You are not locked out of integrations 

 Hello22 AI includes CRM setup, and the Premium plan adds custom integrations, so your calls land where your business already works. You do not need an enterprise contract to get your calendar and CRM connected. 

Setup is yours, not a complex process. 

Paste your website link, and Hello22 AI reads your site to learn about the business. No onboarding call, no waiting on an account manager, no minimum commitment. Your AI receptionist can start answering calls today. 

The one honest exception.  

Hello22 AI does not employ human receptionists, and it is not trying to. If your business genuinely needs a trained person on the line for emotionally difficult calls a personal injury intake, a bereavement enquiry, a crisis line then you need a human receptionist service, and Smith.ai is built for that. Most trades, clinics, salons, agencies and service businesses generally do not have those calls. If yours does, buy humans. If it does not, you would be paying a premium for a safety net you never use. 

How to Choose: Five Simple Questions 

Work through these in order. 

1. How many calls do you get in a month?  – Under 25, Smith.AI free plan is worth trying. Between 25 and 200, Hello22 AI flat pricing almost always works out cheaper. Over that, compare the rates carefully, and remember Smith.ai makes you pick a volume tier in advance. 

2. What is one customer worth to you? T – Every missed call is an opportunity, and each of the customers weighs in gold for us. 

3. Are your calls emotional or straightforward?  – Bookings, quotes, opening hours, availability and general questions suit AI very well, and that is most small business calls. If your phone regularly brings grief, panic,, or crisis-facing customers, go for a human service instead. 

4. What impacts your AI voice agent service selection for your business  – The size of your business, its nature, and your budget. These sectors are the biggest consideration when you are making a choice; the AI receptionist service is for your business. For most of small presentation business owners, Hello22 AI is appropriate because it checks most other boxes 

5. How quickly do you need this to work?   – Hello22 AI goes live in minutes because it reads your website itself. Smith.ai runs proper onboarding, which takes longer but involves more steps. 

Is an AI Receptionist Worth It for a Small Business? 

For most, yes. A part-time human receptionist costs far more than either of these tools once you add wages, superannuation or benefits, sick leave and holidays. And a human receptionist does not work at 9pm on a Sunday. 

Honest math is simple. If an AI receptionist costs you under $100 a month, and it wins you one extra job you would have missed, it has paid itself several times over. For a trades business, that is often a single call. 

The other thing worth saying: it is not really AI versus humans. It is AI versus voicemail. Nobody is choosing between an AI receptionist and a full-time person. They are choosing between an AI receptionist, and nobody is picking up at all. 

Final Thoughts 

Both tools work. They are just built for different businesses. 

Smith.ai is built around outsourced human receptionist people, and it is priced accordingly. If your phone regularly brings emotionally difficult calls, that price is fair and you should pay for it. For everyone else, you are paying a premium for a safety net you will rarely use, on a bill that grows every time your marketing works. 

Hello22 AI is built around one idea: a small business does not need complex tools but something that is practical. And the important thing is that a small business owner should be able to set this up themselves. You paste your website link, learn about your business, pick a voice, and start answering. In case you do not have a website of your own, you can type the details in yourself in Hello22 AI. It gets better as you feed it more. 

If you want to test it properly, do not read another comparison. Take the 7-day free trial/10 minutes, ring your own number, and ask the agent the three questions your customers ask most. 

All prices were checked on each company’s own pricing pages in July 2026. Pricing in this market changes often, so please confirm before you buy it.