Every vendor demo sounds good. The differences show up on a bad phone line, on an unexpected question and in the CRM a week later. Use these questions to evaluate any business voice assistant before you commit.
Hear it on a bad line, not a demo
Call it from a mobile in a busy street. Interrupt it. Ask something it should not know. How it recovers tells you more than any scripted demonstration.
Ask how it knows things
Answers should come from your content — documents, policies, live systems — not from the model's general knowledge. Ask to see what happens when the answer is not in the knowledge base.
Check the integrations are real
A logo on a slide is not an integration. Ask for a live demonstration of a record being created in your CRM or a booking being read from your platform.
Guardrails and handoff
Who decides what the assistant may do? How does a call reach a person, and what does that person see? Can you change the rules yourself?
The checklist
- Response latency under real conditions
- Knowledge grounding and honest fallback
- Live integration demo with your systems
- Configurable guardrails and escalation
- Transcripts, QA scoring and exportable reporting
- Data residency, encryption and retention controls
- Pricing that is understandable at your volume
Judge a voice assistant by its worst call, not its best demo.
