Ace, the AI dispatcher

The problem: renting someone else’s phone agent

24Hr Car Unlocking gets calls at every hour: lockouts, dead batteries, flat tires. For a while an outside vendor ran our AI phone agent. Every change had to go through them, the logic was spread across their automation accounts, and we paid their per-minute price on top of the AI itself.

So Robert built our own. Ace is a calm, confident virtual dispatcher that runs entirely on our stack.

How Ace works

A call to one of our numbers hits Twilio ConversationRelay, which handles speech-to-text, text-to-speech and interruptions. Each call gets its own Cloudflare Durable Object that holds the conversation and streams it to Claude. When Ace needs to act, it calls our Phoenix API directly as tools: verify the ZIP, get a quote from our own price list, look up a job, save the lead.

What Ace handles today

• Takes every service a caller needs and reads the list back to confirm.
• Gets the name, callback number, address and vehicle without re-asking for details it already has.
• If a caller isn’t sure where they are, texts a link so they can drop an exact pin.
• Quotes from our price list and books the job into dispatch.
• Looks up a caller’s active job, and can change or cancel it after confirming.
• Recruits: when a locksmith, roadside tech or tow operator calls about work, Ace gathers their trade, experience, city and license details, saves the inquiry, and texts them a link to upload tool, vehicle and license photos. Partnership calls from shops, tow companies and fleets are logged the same way.
• Transfers to a person when it should, and sets up a callback from a Spanish-speaking team member for Spanish callers.

Speed to lead: the callback in about 30 seconds

When someone finishes a request form on our website, Phoenix calls them back from a local number about 30 seconds later and connects them to Ace, who confirms the details and fixes anything missing. If they started a form and stopped, they get a gentler call a couple of minutes later. Unanswered calls retry twice, and anyone who asks not to be called again isn’t.

What it replaced

Before Ace and our automations, phone intake and follow-up ran through virtual assistants. Moving that work to software saves us about $85K a year in VA costs.

Recruiting without a recruiter

Contractors call a roadside company asking for work all the time. Ace handles those calls too: it asks the questions our team would ask, saves a clean record for follow-up, and sends an upload link for public documents only. It never asks for a Social Security number, date of birth or bank details. If a caller needs service and a job, Ace handles the service first.

What it means for you

The same pattern works for any business that lives on the phone: a voice agent that knows your services and prices, books into your system, and calls new leads back before they call your competitor. It’s also the foundation of Call Rey, our AI receptionist for small businesses.