Venture 02 · Phone assistant
A one-van business misses calls all day, because the person who answers the phone is also the person up the ladder. Arc answers instead, finds out what the job is and where, and texts a job card before the caller has rung the next name on Google.
Most small trades lose work the same way: the phone rings while their hands are full, it goes to voicemail, and the caller, who has a burst pipe and no patience, hangs up and rings the next firm. Nobody leaves a message any more.
Arc is a receptionist that never puts you on hold. When the owner cannot answer, Arc does. It sounds like a person, tells the caller straight away that it is an AI, takes the job, the address and how urgent it is, books it if it can, and texts the owner a job card. The owner rings back the ones worth having.
Arc sells itself in the most honest way we could think of: it rings the business owner, says in the first breath that it is an AI on a recorded line, and asks for thirty seconds. Whatever the owner thinks of the pitch, they have just had a two-minute conversation with the product. If they want to try it as a customer, they ring the demo line back and role-play a job. Many do.
The voice layer is a real-time speech-to-speech stack: streaming recognition, a language model with a short, opinionated prompt per sector, and low-latency synthesis. Each sector, from trades to garages, salons, driving instructors, clinics and home services, has its own pair of agents and its own local phone line, so the pitch, the objections and the caller ID all fit the person picking up.
Behind the voice is an operations platform that runs the whole agency unattended: it screens numbers, schedules the day's calls, learns each call's outcome, books ring-backs at the time the caller asked for, sends the job-card texts, and keeps the record of every conversation. Its own author reads a one-screen brief every morning and makes the human calls the AI cannot.
Arc is in service with its first clients in East Lancashire and is being introduced to businesses across the North West, one sector at a time. It is not on an app store and has no sign-up form; it reaches people by ringing them, which is the point.