AI Receptionist Security and Privacy: What to Ask Before You Buy

An AI receptionist hears everything your front desk would hear: names, addresses, sometimes account numbers, occasionally a medical or legal detail volunteered by a nervous caller. Before you forward your line, you should know exactly what happens to that conversation after it ends.

Vendors rarely publish this clearly, so it is worth asking directly rather than assuming. Below are the questions that matter and how Get Assistant answers them.

Ask what gets recorded and for how long

Every call should produce a transcript and, ideally, an audio recording you can play back if a message seems off. Ask how long that recording is kept and whether you control deletion. Get Assistant retains call recordings for 30 days, alongside a summary and full transcript that stay in your account, plus an email notification for each call.

Ask who can access your call data

• Is data separated per customer, or pooled in a way another tenant could see it?
• Which internal staff at the vendor can access raw recordings, and is that logged?
• Are contacts de-duplicated and stored against your account only?
• Can you export or delete your data if you cancel?

Get Assistant keeps each customer's calls, transcripts and contacts in a separate, per-tenant space — your data is not mixed with another business's account, and contacts are de-duplicated by phone number so you are not left with duplicate records to clean up.

Ask about consent and disclosure

Some states require two-party consent to record a phone call, meaning the caller must be told before the recording starts. This is not a place to guess: call-recording law varies by state and sometimes by whether the caller or receptionist is in a different state than you are. Ask your attorney or state bar resources what applies to your business before you turn recording on, and configure any required disclosure at the start of the call rather than relying on a vendor's default.

Ask about access control on your side

• Can you limit which team members see recordings versus just transcripts?
• Is there a login history or activity log for your own account?
• Can you turn off recording for certain call types, like ones involving payment details?

What this looks like in practice

Write your consent line into the greeting your receptionist uses, keep your emergency and after-hours instructions in the call transfer rules you configure, and review a sample of transcripts weekly rather than only when something goes wrong. Treat the 30-day recording window as a working buffer for quality checks and disputes, not permanent storage — export anything you need to keep longer.

For the rest of the buying checklist, see questions to ask vendors or run our evaluation scorecard.