Guide · November 2026
AI receptionist vs robot receptionist
An AI receptionist answers your calls and chats, while a robot receptionist greets the people who walk in. The phone and the front door are two different jobs, which is why many sites end up needing both.
Start with where your visitors arrive
Before you compare products, count your contacts for one week and sort them into phone calls, website chats and people at the door.
If most of them are calls, start with phone software or a live answering service. If most of them are people standing in your lobby, a check-in kiosk or a robot receptionist is the place to look.
The four options side by side
| AI phone receptionist | Live virtual receptionist service | Check-in kiosk or visitor tablet | Robot receptionist | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it handles | Calls, messages, bookings | Calls and website chats | Visitor sign-in, badges, host alerts | Greeting, questions and directions in person |
| Where it works | On your phone line | On your phone line and website | At a fixed spot in the lobby | On the lobby floor, among the guests |
| Who is behind it | Software | People in a remote team | Software, and the visitor types | Software or a remote person, depending on the product |
| Typical price model | Monthly plan by calls or callers | Monthly plan by minutes or calls | Yearly or monthly plan for each site | Buy, lease, or pay by the hour |
| Set-up | Forward your number and write the answers | Brief the team on your business | Mount a tablet and connect staff lists | Varies from self-install to a managed service |
| Limits | Cannot see or greet a walk-in guest | Cannot see or greet a walk-in guest | Waits for the guest to walk up and type | Needs floor space and power, and does not answer the phone |
Real products and public prices
AI phone receptionist
Smith.ai lists a free AI Receptionist plan with 25 calls and a Pro plan from $150 a month, and its page states that the AI can transfer a complex call to a live receptionist. Goodcall lists plans from $79 to $299 a month and bills by unique caller instead of by minute.
Live virtual receptionist service
Ruby lists plans from $250 a month for 50 receptionist minutes, and the page describes live answering at all hours. Smith.ai has a live service too, with live receptionist plans from $300 a month for 30 calls.
Check-in kiosk or visitor management tablet
Envoy lists a free Basic visitor plan and a Premium plan at $362 a month for each location, billed yearly. Visitors sign in on an iPad. Sign In App lists plans from £415 a year for each site. If you were looking for The Receptionist for iPad, it is now part of Sign In App.
Robot receptionist
Pudu KettyBot Pro is a delivery and reception robot with an 18.5-inch display that drives itself and can lead guests to a table. Pudu shows no price on that page. temi is an autonomous assistant robot with video calls, and the temi site shows a price of $3,999. The third robot is Starlife Bella, which is described below.
Prices checked in November 2026. They change often; check the linked pages.
Choose this if
An AI phone receptionist makes sense if you miss calls after hours and most of the questions repeat. Its public plans also start lower than the plans for a live service. If your callers expect a person on every call, the live virtual receptionist service is the one to pay for.
A check-in kiosk is enough when your visitors already know where to go, because what you need then is a record of who is in the building, and a kiosk gives you that at a low yearly cost. A robot receptionist is for the opposite case, where guests arrive unsure and need a greeting, an answer or directions. The practical difference is that a robot can move toward a guest and a kiosk cannot.
If you have a busy phone line and a busy door, choose two of them. Phone software and a lobby robot do not overlap.
Where Starlife Bella fits
Starlife Bella is a robot receptionist for the lobby floor. It greets each guest and answers questions in a real conversation. It speaks more than 30 languages, with live translation both ways, and what guests hear is the robot's own voice.
You can hire Bella as a front-desk receptionist, at a hotel front desk and as a hospital lobby greeter.
How Bella works
Bella is not autonomous. A trained robot pilot controls it live from a laptop, with AI assistance, which means the guest talks with a real person through a friendly robot.
Starlife provides the robot pilot, the driving and the maintenance, so your staff do not run the robot. Bella has built-in 5G and needs no customer Wi-Fi. It does need one power outlet, and it works indoors only.
What Bella costs
Bella costs from $10 an hour, and most deployments cost $10 to $20 an hour. You pay by the hour, with no big contract. See pricing.
The normal way to start is a 14-day pilot, and lead time is about one week. Bella is available in the United States and Germany.
What to keep beside Bella
Bella works in the lobby and does not work on your phone line, so keep an AI phone receptionist or a live service for calls. The same is true of visitor records, which are a job for a kiosk: if you need sign-in records and badges, keep your kiosk.
In a 14-day pilot at American Dream mall, one Bella robot had 2,222 guest engagements. Read the case study.
The easiest way to judge the fit is to see Bella greet guests at your front desk. Book a demo.