An AI receptionist that answers in fluent Icelandic and never misses a call
Raddmenni answers the phone around the clock, handles 70%+ of inbound calls entirely on its own, and forwards the rest to the right person. Fixing real-time multi-channel Icelandic transcription, the thing off-the-shelf voice AI could not do, is what made it possible.
See it live at menni.ai
Challenges and solutions
Transcribing a live Icelandic call without it falling apart
The challengeSpeech-to-text handles Icelandic vocabulary reasonably well. Live, two-way calls are where it broke: duplicated text, only one side of the conversation captured, or the caller's half delivered in a single burst at the very end. An agent reasoning over a transcript like that is guessing.
What we shippedWe fixed real-time multi-channel Icelandic transcription so both sides of a live call come through cleanly and in order. That reliability is the whole product. It is what lets the agent hold a natural conversation, understand names and places, and earn enough trust that callers treat it like a real receptionist.
Never inventing an answer on the phone
The challengeOn a call there is no link to click and no page to double-check. Whatever the agent says is the answer the customer acts on, so a plausible-sounding guess about opening hours or availability does real damage.
What we shippedThe caller's intent is matched against the client's own knowledge base, so phone answers come from the company's real policies and content. Anything outside that is treated as a handover, not an opportunity to improvise.
Helping a caller with things you cannot say out loud
The challengeDirections, price lists and booking links are miserable to deliver by voice. Reading a URL down the phone is how you lose a customer.
What we shippedThe agent sends an SMS mid-call: a Google Maps pin, a price list, a booking link. The caller gets what they need in writing while still on the line, and the call ends with the job actually done.
Knowing when to hand the call to a person
The challengeAutomating the easy 70% is only safe if the other 30% reliably reaches someone. A confident agent that pushes on past its limits is worse than one that never picks up.
What we shippedWhen a call falls outside what the agent can handle confidently, it forwards to the right staff member rather than guessing, and records why it forwarded. Nothing important quietly disappears into an automated dead end.
Giving the client proof of what happened on every call
The challengeBusinesses will not hand their phone line to AI on faith. They need to see what was said, how it went, and where it went wrong.
What we shippedEvery call is captured: summary, transcript, recording, duration, language, category, a success evaluation, and the forwarding reason, all streamed into the client dashboard for full visibility.
Before and after
- BeforeCalls after hours going to voicemailAfterEvery call answered, 24/7
- BeforeVoice AI mishearing live Icelandic conversationAfterBoth sides of the call transcribed cleanly and in order
- BeforeStaff absorbing the same repetitive questions all dayAfter70%+ of calls handled end to end without a person
- BeforeDirections and prices read out loud over the phoneAfterA map pin, price list or booking link sent by SMS mid-call
- BeforeNo record of what was actually saidAfterTranscript, recording, summary and outcome on every call
Why the live call is the hard part
Phones are where support is hardest to scale. Calls come in after hours and in peak season, all asking the same handful of things: availability, directions, opening hours, changes to a booking. Miss them and you lose business. Staff them fully and you burn money.
The real blocker for voice AI in Iceland was never the words. It was the live call. A batch transcript can be cleaned up after the fact. A phone agent has to reason about the conversation while it is still happening, which means every duplicate, dropped channel and out-of-order burst lands directly in the agent's understanding of what the caller just said.
We fixed real-time multi-channel Icelandic transcription, so both sides of a live call come through cleanly and in order. That is the difference between a demo and a phone agent customers actually trust, and it is exactly where off-the-shelf voice AI falls over in Icelandic. It drove Menni's viral local adoption and the funding that followed.
Raddmenni is marketed in Iceland as the country's most affordable phone answering, and it is the agent that put Menni on the map.
Phone AI handles 70%+ of inbound calls entirely on its own, 24/7, in fluent Icelandic and over 100 other languages, forwarding only the calls that genuinely need a person. Businesses stop missing calls outside office hours, callers get instant answers instead of voicemail, and the support team is freed from the most repetitive part of the job.
Technology stack
Part of the Menni.ai platform
Phone AI is one of three AI agents we built for Menni.ai.
Does voice AI break in your language?
We made real-time voice work in Icelandic when nothing off the shelf could. If your market speaks a language the big providers treat as an afterthought, that is the kind of problem we take.