Nine of eleven Swedish AI receptionists only answer the phone
An AI receptionist is sold as something that handles what comes in. We went through eleven Swedish vendors' own pages and counted the channels they actually publish. Nine of eleven answer the phone and little else, while customers get in touch half a dozen other ways.
Your customer decides where the conversation starts. One person calls because it is urgent. Another types in the chat window while comparing prices. A third replies to your Instagram post at eleven at night, a fourth emails a request on Monday morning, a fifth texts the number printed on the invoice.
It is the same kind of errand every time. Book a slot, ask a price, check whether you have one in stock. What differs is which app the customer happened to have open.
We wanted to know how the Swedish AI receptionist market handles that, so on 31 August 2026 we went through eleven vendors' own pages and counted the inbound channels they publish. Not what they could build, but what the site says.
What we found
Nine of eleven publish the phone and almost nothing else.
- Telink, Koppla, Casova, AI-Reception, Dstny and Techgruppen: phone only.
- Elyra, which launched this spring backed by Y Combinator: phone and email.
- Menodi: phone and SMS.
- SARA: phone, SMS and email. WhatsApp is described as under development.
- Skaala: phone, a web widget and chat.
- Telavox answers the phone and prices SMS and WhatsApp per message, one krona each.
None of the eleven publishes Messenger. None publishes Instagram. None publishes Telegram. Two of eleven mention email.
A channel missing from a pricing page does not prove it is impossible to build. But a vendor who can answer on Instagram tends to say so, because that is exactly the sort of thing you write down when you have it.
Why this is not a detail
A company that only answers the phone catches the customer who calls. That number is easy to measure and easy to feel good about.
What it does not show is the rest. The Messenger message on Saturday night that sits unread until Tuesday. The chat window nobody staffs after five. The email in a shared inbox where three people each assume someone else replied. Those errands do not disappear, they just go to whoever answered faster.
If you already have a person answering the phone during office hours, the phone is not your expensive problem either. The expensive part is evenings, weekends and the five other places people write to you.
What Kim does instead
Kim, our AI assistant, takes messages on eight channels: phone, web chat, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Telegram. All eight are running, not planned.
The number matters less than the fact that it is the same assistant behind all eight. Same opening hours, same prices, same knowledge of what you do, same booking in your own system. Kim answers an Instagram DM the way it answers the phone, because the same knowledge is doing the answering.
The thread also follows the person rather than the channel. Someone who called on Tuesday and writes in the chat on Thursday meets an assistant that already knows what it was about. If you want to take over mid conversation you do it from the portal, whichever channel it is running in.
The price tells you about the shape
While we were reading their pages we noted the prices, because the pricing model says something about what you are actually buying.
Telavox's entry tier costs 999 kronor a month and includes zero call minutes. Every minute costs 2.50 kronor on top. Telink charges 1,495 kronor a month for 300 minutes, then 4 kronor a minute, plus a 4,995 kronor setup fee before anything has answered a single call. All four of Dstny's tiers are labelled campaign price, without saying what the ordinary price is or how long the campaign runs. Four of the eleven publish no price at all.
Our simplest tier with telephony costs 999 kronor a month and includes 150 calls and 300 minutes. That covers most of the small businesses we work with. Larger packages exist for higher volumes, and there is no lock-in and no setup fee.
We are not claiming the lowest price at every conceivable call volume. At high volumes there are cheaper options and you should do the maths. We are claiming you can work out what you will pay before you sign, which is not a given in this market.
Four questions to ask any vendor
Which channels do you answer on, and which of them are running today at a real customer?
Is it the same assistant across all channels, or separate setups that each have to be maintained?
What does a month with three hundred calls cost, everything included, setup fee and overage minutes as well?
What happens when the assistant cannot handle something, and how do we find out that it happened?
If you get four straight answers the vendor is probably worth talking to, whoever it is.
About the numbers
Everything above was read on the vendors' own public pages on 31 August 2026. We have not called any of them, taken a demo or tested their products, so this is what they write about themselves and nothing more. Prices and features change, sometimes within the same week. If you find something that no longer holds, tell us and we will correct it.