Compliance and telephony terms around AI receptionists, explained briefly with sources.
A business associate agreement is the contract HIPAA requires between a covered entity and a vendor that creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on its behalf.
Call forwarding sends calls from your existing business number to the AI receptionist, either always, when the line is busy, when nobody answers, or outside business hours.
Concurrency is the number of calls an AI receptionist can handle at the same time on one account or plan.
Enhanced 911 (E911) delivers a caller's number and location to the 911 dispatcher.
A hallucination is a confident but false answer produced by a language model, for example invented opening hours, prices or policies.
HIPAA is the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Latency is the pause between the end of the caller's sentence and the start of the AI's answer.
Overage is the price charged for usage beyond the minutes, calls or callers included in a plan.
A SIP trunk connects a phone system to the telephone network over the internet using the Session Initiation Protocol.
SOC 2 is an attestation report by an independent CPA firm on a service organization's controls relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality or privacy, based on AICPA criteria.
Subprocessors are third parties a vendor uses to process customer data, for example for telephony, speech recognition, language models, speech synthesis or hosting.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (47 U.S.C. 227) restricts calls and texts made with an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice.
Training on call data means a vendor or its model provider uses recordings or transcripts of your calls to train or improve AI models.
Two-party or all-party consent means that every participant in a phone call must agree before the call is recorded.
A warm transfer passes a live call to a person together with context, for example a short summary spoken or sent to the staff member before the caller is connected.