The term "virtual receptionist" is overloaded. It can mean a remote human or an AI agent. Here's the technical breakdown of what each actually does and when the AI option makes engineering sense. Architecture: Human vs AI Pipeline Human virtual receptionist: Phone → PBX routing → Hold queue → Human agent → Manual CRM entry → Callback/message AI receptionist (2026 stack): Phone → SIP/PSTN → Real-time STT → NLU intent classification → Dialog manager → Action execution (booking API, CRM write) → TTS response → All in <500ms round-trip The AI pipeline eliminates queuing, manual data entry, and transcription errors entirely.…