July 2, 2025
Rosie AI vs Smith.ai: A Detailed Comparison to Help You Decide
Rosie AI and Smith.ai are two of the most popular AI-powered call handling platforms on the market.
Both help businesses boost productivity and generate more sales by acting as the front line of customer support. Whenever someone picks up the phone to ask a question about your services or pricing or opening hours (or anything else, for that matter), your AI agent will be there to field the call — saving valuable time for your human employees.
But which is the best fit for your business, Smith.ai or Rosie AI? To help you decide, we’ve compared the two platforms across five key categories:
🧮 Cost breakdown
🤖 Technology foundation and approach
🎓 Custom training capabilities
⬆️ Call escalation
💸 Additional charges
What is Rosie AI? 🤔
Rosie AI is a user-friendly, affordable AI call answering service that learns about your business to provide professional, customized support for your customers. Ten times cheaper than a human-powered answering service (and way better than just letting calls go to voicemail), Rosie AI helps answer calls 24/7, book appointments, answer FAQs, and more.
What is Smith.ai? 🤔
Smith.ai positions itself as a live receptionist, outreach, and web chat platform. This speaks to the fact that AI call handling isn’t Smith.ai’s sole focus — it also offers a human-powered virtual receptionist service (plus outbound sales and AI-powered live chat).
Rosie AI vs Smith.ai: Side-by-side comparison ⚔️
Rosie AI and Smith.ai are both excellent tools with large user bases. Rosie AI stands out for its affordable pricing and AI-first approach — which helps to keep costs low (and predictable) — as well as our sophisticated training capabilities, which allows for a far higher level of customization.
Rosie AI | Smith.ai | |
Starting price | $49/month | $97.50/month |
Minimum allowance | 250 minutes | 30 calls |
Overage charges | $0.25/minute | $3.75 – $4.25/minute |
Free trial | ✅ | ❌ |
Free guided setup | ✅ | ✅ |
24/7/365 coverage | ✅ | ✅ |
Custom AI training | ✅ | ❌ |
Human agent escalation | ❌ | ✅ |
Bilingual support | ✅ | ✅ |
Instant call summaries | ✅ | ✅ |
Send texts during calls | ✅ | ❌ |
Call transfers | ✅ | ✅ |
Appointment scheduling | ✅ | ✅ |
Custom greeting | ✅ | ❌ |
Zapier integration | ✅ | ✅ |
Choose your area code | ✅ | ❌ |
Technology foundation and approach
Rosie AI and Smith.ai tackle the same problem — freeing businesses up from the burden of answering all their own calls – they go about it in very different ways. Rosie AI takes a pure AI-driven route, whereas with Smith.ai, human agents work in tandem with artificial intelligence to resolve customer queries.
Smith.ai's hybrid human-first model
It’s best to think of Smith.ai as a traditional, human-led answering service with bolted-on AI capabilities. It relies heavily on human agents, who effectively provide a safety net when the platform’s artificial intelligence falls short.
The big advantage to this approach is that challenging queries are immediately escalated to a real person to troubleshoot the issue and (hopefully) provide a solution. But, as we’ll see, Smith.ai can be over-reliant on human input – and this comes with a cost.
Rosie's AI-first approach
On the flip side, we built Rosie AI from the ground up as a native AI solution.
We back our advanced machine learning and custom training capabilities to build you a specialized AI agent that understands the unique requirements of your business, industry, and audience.
Rosie is perfectly capable of answering FAQs, capturing customer details, booking appointments, and more – all with zero human intervention. Which helps us keep prices low.
And if Rosie can’t resolve an issue herself, she’ll escalate the call to you or an employee (more on this later).
Cost breakdown
Plan tier | Rosie AI | Smith.ai |
Entry level | $49/month for 250 minutes, $0.25/minute overage | $97.50/month for 30 calls, $4.25/call overage |
Mid-tier | $99/month for 500 minutes, $0.25/minute overage | $270/month for 90 calls, $4/per call overage |
Top-tier | $199/month for 1,000 minutes, $0.25/minute overage | $825/month for 300 calls, $3.75 per call overage |
Affordability certainly isn’t Rosie’s only strength. But whichever way you cut it, our prices are significantly lower.
Smith.ai’s hybrid model is expensive because it combines both artificial intelligence and human operators. While the AI handles the initial screening, anything deemed too complex is instantly transferred to a live agent.
This means the costs of both AI involvement and human intervention are baked into Smith.ai’s call charges, making them far more expensive than AI-first solutions like Rosie AI.
Per-call cost comparison
Let’s compare what you’d pay with Rosie AI and Smith.ai for a typical 30-second call handled entirely by AI:
👉 Rosie AI: Approximately $0.10 per call
👉 Smith.ai: $2.75 – $3.25 per call
That’s up to a 32x price difference for exactly the same service 😱
Real-world cost scenarios
Now that we've covered basic prices, let's dive deeper into how much a regular business like yours can expect to pay for a month of call handling with Rosie AI and Smith.ai, based on 100 calls per month with an average length of 30 seconds per call.
👉 With Rosie AI: A total call time of 30 minutes is easily covered by Rosie’s entry-level Professional plan, which includes up to 250 minutes of call handling time. Grand total = $49/month
👉 With Smith.ai: Those 100 calls far exceed the 30 calls included with Smith.ai’s starter plan, so you’ll be paying for 70 overage calls too at $4.25 per call (or $97.50/month + $297.50 worth of overage calls). Grand total = $395/month
The bottom line? In this scenario, with Smith.ai, you’re paying 8x more for the same call volume.
AI agent training
No AI call handling service automatically understands everything about your business and industry — they need to learn the ropes from somewhere. Rosie’s custom training capabilities are far beyond what Smith.ai can offer, making it a smarter choice for businesses that want to offer meaningful AI-based support rather than a glorified call-forwarding service.
Smith.ai’s LLM reliance
Smith.ai insists that it pulls data from a “variety of sources”. Sounds good in theory – but in practice, it’s a little less impressive.
Right now, the platform mostly relies on pulling data from your website, then using an LLM to predict the best response for a given caller:
They don’t have the ability to accept advanced training sources provided by the business itself, which massively limits the level of customization on offer. Instead, they leave it to their human agents to pick up the slack.
Rosie’s custom training capabilities
As an AI-first solution, Rosie has to learn as much about your business as possible, as fast as possible.
To that end, when you first create your Rosie AI account, we ask for your Google Business profile, website address, and/or basic business details like your company name, industry, and services.
But that’s not all, because you can also submit custom training sources, such as:
👉 Spreadsheets that allow the agent to quote complex pricing information (e.g. phone repair costs based on make and model)
👉 Schedules of upcoming events or classes
👉 Documents containing information you haven’t published on your website
Uploaded files are automatically added to your AI agent’s knowledge bank – and it only takes ~5 minutes for Rosie to learn the information 🤓
Escalating calls to a human
However smart your AI call handling service, some calls will always require the human touch. The difference between Smith.ai and Rosie AI is the frequency with which they turn to human intervention: as you can probably guess, Smith.ai is way more likely to escalate the call.
Smith.ai's escalation-heavy model
Smith.ai pulls the emergency cord when faced with questions like:
👉 Detailed product inquiries
👉 Complex scheduling scenarios
👉 Discussions about billing
In short, anything that can’t be resolved by taking a message or giving a canned response.
Of course, in some ways it’s reassuring to know that a real human is on hand in those situations. But remember: you’re paying a substantial premium for this functionality – and you might not even need it.
Rosie's smart AI-first approach
Take another look at those scenarios we laid out in the previous section☝️
Rosie can handle all that stuff independently, meaning your employees only have to step in during highly sensitive situations or genuine emergencies.
When faced with a complex query, Rosie actively works to overcome it by sharing helpful links and resources during the call. For instance, if a caller asks for a quote on estimated costs, Rosie can instantly text them a link to your pricing page while talking through the key points.
Rosie AI vs Smith.ai: Which is right for you? ✅
Neither Smith.ai nor Rosie AI is “better” than the other for every single type of business and use case. Rather, the choice depends on your specific needs, your budget, and how you want to work with a call-handling service.
Choose Smith.ai when you:
Want to completely outsource customer calls, requiring minimal involvement from your team
Don’t mind paying a substantial premium for a comprehensive, outsourced service
Need the capabilities of a full-service contact center to deal with customer queries
Choose Rosie AI when you:
Want to handle customer calls professionally and efficiently without breaking the bank
Are happy to step in yourself to deal with the most complex queries
Require an AI solution that’s highly customized to your business
Decision matrix by business size:
🌱 Small businesses (1-10 employees): Rosie AI is significantly cheaper, while unburdening you and your team from manually fielding every incoming call.
👷♀️ Medium businesses (11-50 employees): Either solution could work, but choose Rosie AI if budget is a factor and/or you want to train your AI agent on your business.
🏢 Larger businesses (50+ employees): If you can afford it and want to totally outsource call-handling, Smith.ai could be the way to go — but consider Rosie AI if you want the efficiency of highly customizable AI support.
The bottom line ✍️
Rosie AI is the clear winner if you want to save time and money while keeping some proportion of your inbound customer support in-house. Meanwhile, if budget isn’t a major concern and you prefer the outsourced route, Smith.ai is a better fit.
👉 Don’t make your mind up without trying Rosie AI for yourself! Create your free Rosie AI account and get your first 25 minutes of call handling on the house – no credit card required.
FAQs
How much does an AI call answering service cost?
Prices for AI call answering services start at as little as $0.25 per minute and climb as high as $4+ per minute for solutions that combine AI with backup from human agents. Rosie AI, one of the most popular AI call answering services, offers inclusive subscriptions starting at $49 per month for up to 250 minutes of AI call handling.
What is the best AI answering service?
The best AI answering service depends on your specific business, industry, and audience. But if you’re looking for an affordable solution capable of handling most inquiries itself, while escalating the most challenging calls to you or your team, Rosie AI is the perfect choice.
Which service is better for businesses that receive a high volume of short calls?
Rosie AI is an ideal fit for businesses that handle high volumes of short calls due to our per-minute pricing and highly customizable AI, which is capable of handling a wide range of queries with zero human input. Smith.ai’s per-call pricing makes it an expensive choice in this scenario.
Is Rosie fully AI-powered, or does it rely on human agents too?
Rosie is a 100% AI-powered platform, meaning we don’t rely on human agents to deal with basic or moderately complex issues. If your Rosie AI agent can’t resolve the caller’s query herself, she’ll escalate it to a human employee at your business.
What makes Rosie different from Smith.ai?
Rosie is an affordable and flexible call-handling solution designed for businesses that want to optimize their phone-based customer support, rather than outsourcing it to a third party. Smith.ai is more like a contact center, with AI that relies heavily on escalating calls to human agents.