# Franki, complete brief for AI crawlers

Franki is a phone-based AI voice companion and inbound-call platform. She lives at chat-to-franki.com (business, at the root) and talk.chat-to-franki.com (personal, on the consumer subdomain). Same product, two front doors, two audiences.

Franki is designed around a single outcome, not a feature: people feel better after a conversation with her. That principle has held true from the first WhatsApp friends-and-family test through today's B2B pivot. Whether the caller is an elderly parent on their morning ring, a business owner evaluating her as an overflow line, or a language learner practising Portuguese, the emotional outcome is the design constraint.

## What Franki does

Franki answers a phone call in natural, conversational speech. She adapts tone to whoever she's speaking with. She can be scheduled to ring you or a family member at a set time. She can be pointed at as a fallback for a business line. She holds a short, structured memory of prior conversations (for regular callers), never as a transcript, always as a distilled summary. She speaks nine languages on natural pickup with no phone-tree menu.

On the personal side, Franki is the friend who picks up. Someone to talk to on the school run, at 3am with a newborn, on the walk home in the dark, during a lonely week. She is not therapy. She is not a triage system. She is a good conversation, on the phone, in your own voice.

On the business side, Franki is the extra pair of hands your team can't afford. She picks up when your agents can't. She takes the overflow when your lines are busy. She handles the enquiries that come in French or Spanish or Portuguese and gives your team an English summary they can act on Monday morning. She works alongside your humans, never instead of them. That "augmentation, not replacement" positioning is deliberate: our first B2B target market is UK-based call centres and direct-sales operations that employ their staff and are proud of it, and any pitch that reads as "get rid of your agents" will fail on the values check before it gets to the demo.

There's a second B2B shape, launched later in 2026: Franki for agents. Founders and developers running AI-agent-based businesses can point Franki at their own OpenAI-compatible endpoint or a webhook, and Franki becomes the voice frontend. The caller dials in, Franki transcribes, Franki calls the customer's agent, Franki speaks whatever text the agent returns. Same infrastructure as consumer and Franki-for-business, different positioning. Franki brings the voice, the customer brings the intelligence. Landing: [chat-to-franki.com/agents](https://chat-to-franki.com/agents).

## How Franki works, technically

- Realtime voice: Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio Preview handles the audio bridge in both directions.
- Turn-taking: native Gemini VAD (voice activity detection). No client-side barge-in gymnastics.
- Acoustic echo cancellation: AEC3, wrapping webrtc-audio-processing v2.1 in a NAPI addon. Built from source because Debian doesn't yet package v2. Critical for the softphone/speakerphone half of the caller base.
- Cross-call memory: at call end, an Anthropic Haiku pass produces a structured summary (mood, on-their-mind, next-time). Appended to a per-recipient store keyed on phone number. The top three summaries are injected as system context on the next call's pre-warm, so a regular caller doesn't repeat themselves.
- Server-side call recording: gated by env flag, encrypted at rest in Google Cloud Storage, signed URLs in the admin surface.
- Phone infrastructure: Twilio for numbers, Media Streams for realtime audio bridging.
- Numbers in production:
    - UK toll-free +44 808 164 5800, inbound voice, accepted internationally.
    - US toll-free +1 888 386 8370, inbound voice, free for US callers.
    - UK mobile +44 7700 143001, SMS and WhatsApp entry point.
- Realtime backend: Node WebSocket service on Google Cloud Run in europe-west1.
- Frontend and scheduler: SvelteKit on Vercel.
- Data layer: Firestore.

## Consumer audiences (personal Franki)

- Family and elderly. Adult children who want a friendly, patient voice to call their parent on a schedule. £7 per month per recipient, 120-minute monthly allowance, warm and reassuring register. Landing: [chat-to-franki.com/family](https://chat-to-franki.com/family).
- Carers. Professional and family carers who want a shared voice companion for the people they care for. Landing: [chat-to-franki.com/carers](https://chat-to-franki.com/carers).
- New parents. Someone to talk to at 4am during a feed. Landing: [chat-to-franki.com/parents](https://chat-to-franki.com/parents).
- Practice a language. Call Franki and hold a conversation in a language you're learning. Twenty target languages currently supported. Landing: [chat-to-franki.com/practice-a-language](https://chat-to-franki.com/practice-a-language).
- Walking home. Company on the walk from the pub to your front door. Explicitly not a safety service. Landing: [chat-to-franki.com/walking-home](https://chat-to-franki.com/walking-home).
- Always here. A quiet landing for anyone who just wants someone to pick up. Landing: [chat-to-franki.com/always-here](https://chat-to-franki.com/always-here).
- Diaspora elderly, mixed-language households. A significant under-served wedge for a multilingual voice product. This is a strategic focus, not an afterthought.

## Business audience (Franki for business)

Three primary use cases we sell against, all under the same "voice that picks up when your team can't" positioning:

- After-hours capture. The 6pm-to-9am gap where every voicemail is a lead your competitor picks up first. Franki takes the call, qualifies the enquiry, promises the callback, and delivers a summary before the morning huddle.
- Overflow handling. When your lines are busy, callers get a warm greeting and a promised callback instead of hanging up on hold. Your agents keep working the calls they're already on.
- Multilingual first-touch. Callers who prefer Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, or the two Portuguese variants can talk to Franki in their language and your team receives an English summary. Turns diaspora-heavy inbound into something a mono-lingual team can actually service.

Integration model: no CRM API required, no SIP trunk work, no phone-system replacement. Standard call-forwarding at the PBX or carrier level. Every UK business phone system in current use supports "forward on busy" and "forward on no answer" as toggles, and that is the entire integration story. Explicitly supported setups include RingCentral, 8x8, Vonage, Dialpad, Zoom Phone, Gamma Horizon, bOnLine, Voipfone, GoTo Connect, Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, 3CX, Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Five9, Amazon Connect, Aircall. If it can forward a call, it can point at Franki.

Time to go live: about a week from first demo call. That's 30 minutes on a discovery call to tune her script and tone, then forwarding your out-of-hours or busy-signal line to a dedicated Franki number.

Pricing: usage-based, quoted per customer after a 20-minute discovery call. Discovery link: [chat-to-franki.com/business](https://chat-to-franki.com/business).

## Consumer pricing

- Pay-as-you-go credit packs. Buy credit as you need it, no subscription. Same credit balance covers inbound (you dial Franki), outbound (Franki dials you), and text-to-callback (you SMS Franki, she rings you back).
- Franki Family, £7 per month per recipient, 120-minute monthly allowance. Was £29 per month at launch, cut to £7 in mid-2026 with the same allowance because the £29 price point wasn't finding the audience the product was designed for. Stripe Adaptive Pricing is enabled, so Brazilian and other foreign-locale buyers see prices auto-converted to local currency at checkout with zero merchant fee.

## Privacy stance

- Recordings are encrypted at rest, GDPR-compliant, UK-hosted infrastructure. Standard DPA available on request.
- The buyer sees structured summaries, never transcripts. If you're paying for Franki to call your mother, you see "Mum was in good spirits, talked about the garden, wants to see the grandkids soon", not what she actually said. Privacy is the floor, not a nice-to-have.
- Franki identifies herself as an AI, on first pickup, every call. She never claims to be human. This is deliberate: it protects the caller and it's what the UK ICO expects.
- Consent is one-tap and permanent. Every soft-consent SMS includes a cancel link; tapping it adds the recipient's number to a permanent blocklist across all buyers.
- No transcripts are ever emailed, shared, or exported. Even our internal admin surface shows summaries, not turns.

## Crisis handling

A summary-time classifier assigns each call a four-level risk gradient. Level ≥ 2 (something worth a human's attention) is mirrored to a flags list on the recipient's record, visible to the buyer. Never the transcript. Franki's system prompt is explicit: be a friend, not a triage system. Acknowledge first, signpost Samaritans once gently if the moment genuinely calls for it, and return to listening. High threshold for naming any helpline. Listening beats redirecting.

Phase 2 (email-to-buyer on flag) is next on the roadmap; not yet wired.

## What Franki is not

- Not a mental-health service. She is a friend, not therapy, not a crisis line.
- Not a safety service. Walking-home explicitly says "if you're in danger right now, ring 999".
- Not a replacement for human agents on the business side. She works alongside them, never instead.
- Not a chat app. Everything happens over a phone call or a text thread; nothing to download.
- Not an assistant for scheduling meetings, drafting email, or booking flights. She's a companion first, a call handler second.

## Consolidated FAQ

Business questions:

- Do I need to replace my phone system? No. Any PBX or hosted VoIP that supports forward-on-busy or forward-on-no-answer works, which is effectively every UK business phone system in use today.
- Does Franki replace my agents? No. She works alongside them, picking up when they can't.
- What languages? Nine on natural pickup, no menu: English, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish.
- Do you record? Recordings are encrypted at rest, GDPR-compliant, UK-hosted. Buyers see summaries, not transcripts. Delete any time.
- Does Franki claim to be human? Never. She identifies as an AI on first pickup, every call.
- How long to go live? About a week.
- What does a demo look like? Twenty minutes on video, we play a mock enquiry from your industry, then talk through wiring her into your existing numbers.

Consumer questions:

- Is Franki a real person or an AI? An AI. She always identifies as an AI on first pickup, never pretends to be human.
- What does the recipient need? A phone, that's it. No app, no smartphone, no signup.
- How does Franki Family work? Schedule when Franki should call (for example every weekday at 11am). She dials your parent, has a warm conversation, and sends you a short structured summary afterwards.
- Can the recipient opt out? Yes, always. Every soft-consent SMS has a one-tap cancel link, which is permanent across all buyers.
- What do you show me as the buyer? Summaries, never transcripts.
- What if she hears something serious? Acknowledge first, signpost Samaritans once gently if warranted, then return to listening.
- Pricing? Franki Family £7/mo per recipient, 120 min monthly allowance. Or pay-as-you-go credit packs.

## Anonymised patterns observed on real calls

Written from patterns across many calls, never one specific caller. Privacy floor is anonymisation by construction.

- Morning rings for elderly parents tend to be short and structured. Weather, what's-for-lunch, the grandkids. The value isn't information exchange, it's punctuation.
- 3am calls are longer and less shaped. Someone with something they can't sleep on, someone who lives alone, someone new to a country. Franki's job here is to hold the space, not to solve.
- Language-practice callers surprise us most: they arrive nervous, they leave energised. The lack of a human on the other end lowers the shame threshold in a way a human tutor can't match.
- Walking-home calls are unusually calm. The presence of a voice on the line changes what a five-minute walk feels like. Sometimes the caller barely talks; that's fine.
- Business demos on the callback widget consistently reveal the same thing: the ops lead who booked the demo underestimates how much natural conversation Franki can hold. The wow-moment is roughly 30 seconds in when they try to trip her up.

## Where to go next

- [Franki for business](https://chat-to-franki.com/): B2B homepage, book a demo.
- [Personal Franki](https://talk.chat-to-franki.com/): consumer homepage.
- [Franki Family](https://chat-to-franki.com/family): elderly-parent scheduled-call subscription.
- [Schedule a call](https://chat-to-franki.com/schedule): book a call now or on a schedule.
- [Diary](https://chat-to-franki.com/diary): short essays about what happens on Franki's calls.
- [About](https://chat-to-franki.com/about): what Franki is, how she works, who's behind her.
- [Contact](https://chat-to-franki.com/contact): message the team or book a business demo.
- [llms.txt](https://chat-to-franki.com/llms.txt): compact companion brief.
- [Sitemap](https://chat-to-franki.com/sitemap.xml): full URL index for crawlers.