An AI receptionist is a voice-based system that can answer calls and talk to customers without a person answering every call.

The cost of an AI receptionist depends on how much a business uses it. More calls and longer calls can increase the cost.

A voice AI receptionist uses a few different tools to handle a call. Speech-to-Text (STT) changes the customer’s speech into text. Deepgram is an example.

The text then goes to an LLM like Claude to generate the response.

The response is then converted to voice using Text-to-Speech (TTS). One tool that can be used for this is ElevenLabs.

This cost can be different depending on the number or length of calls or with different tools used.

Customer speaks → STT → LLM → TTS → Customer hears

Here is a simple look at the three parts:

Part	Provider	Model	Pricing
Speech-to-Text (STT)	OpenAI Deepgram Assembly AI	Whisper Flux English Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime	$0.006/min $0.0065/min $0.45/hour
Text-to-Text (LLM)	OpenAI Claude Google Gemini	GPT-5.4 mini Sonnet 5 Gemini 2.5 Flash	Input: $0.75 / 1M tokens Output: $4.50 / 1M tokens Input: $2 / 1M tokens Output: $10 / 1M tokens Input: $0.30 / 1M tokens Output: $2.50 / 1M tokens
Text-to-Speech (TTS)	ElevenLabs Google Cloud Deepgram	v3 Conversational Standard voices Aura 2	$0.05 / 1,000 characters $4 / 1M characters after 4M free characters/month 0.03/1K characters