Standing up an AI receptionist (Numa or Smith.ai) for a trades shop

An AI-handled inbound phone path for the times your dispatcher can't pick up: after hours, during the morning rush, and on the technician's lunch hour. Two viable vendor choices: Numa (pure AI, tighter integration with ServiceTitan / Housecall Pro, lower per-call cost) and Smith.ai (hybrid AI-plus-human, safer when the cost of a botched call is high). The deployment doesn't replace your existing dispatcher — it catches the calls they miss. Roles affected: dispatcher (their queue shrinks slightly, but they pick up more critical calls), owner (sees the recovered-revenue data weekly), field techs (no change). What the deployment looks like at the end: an automated greeting routes calls based on emergency vs routine; routine calls schedule themselves into your existing FSM platform; emergency calls escalate to a human channel within seconds.