AI Disclosure

1Bea is an AI, not a person

She has a human name and a natural-sounding voice because that makes calls easier and more pleasant for the people who ring. It is not meant to trick anyone, and we do not let it.

2How Bea identifies herself

• If a caller asks whether they are speaking to a real person, Bea says no and confirms she is an AI assistant. This behaviour is built in and our customers cannot switch it off.
• Businesses configure their own greeting, and we recommend — and by default provide — wording that makes the AI nature clear from the first sentence.
• Bea will not claim to be human, claim a human name as her own identity beyond the assistant name, or pretend to have personal experiences she does not have.

Our Terms & Conditions prohibit customers from using the service to mislead callers about who they are dealing with.

3How it works

When someone calls a business using Bea, four things happen in roughly a second:

1. Speech to text. What the caller says is converted into text by a speech recognition model.
2. Understanding and response. A large language model works out what the caller wants and composes a reply, using the business information the customer has given us — services, hours, pricing, FAQs, transfer rules.
3. Text to speech. The reply is spoken back in Bea’s voice.
4. Action. Where appropriate she captures the details, books the appointment, sends an SMS or transfers the call.

We license the underlying speech and language models from specialist providers rather than building them ourselves. Bea is not a general-purpose chatbot: she is constrained to the business she is answering for.

4What Bea cannot do

• She does not give medical, legal or financial advice, and will not pretend to.
• She can mishear — names, numbers, addresses and unusual words are the common ones, especially on a poor line or with background noise.
• She can be wrong. She answers from the information the business gave her, and if that information is out of date her answer will be too.
• She does not make decisions about people — she does not assess, score, rank or screen callers.
• She cannot do anything the business has not set her up to do.

5Getting to a human

Every business using Bea sets rules for when a call should go to a person. Typically:

• Ask. If a caller asks to speak to a person, Bea will transfer them where a transfer number is configured, or take a message and flag it as a callback request.
• Urgency. Where the business has defined what counts as urgent, Bea escalates those calls to an on-call number.
• Out of scope. If she cannot help, she takes a message rather than guessing.

How well this works depends on the rules the business sets. If you called a business and could not get through to a person, tell that business — they control it.

6What happens to what you say

• A transcript and summary of the call are produced and sent to the business you called.
• Call audio is only recorded if that business has turned recording on. Recording is off by default. If it is on, you will be told at the start of the call — see the Call Recording Policy.
• Your conversation is not used to train public AI models. Our agreements with our AI providers are configured to prevent it.
• We may look at de-identified, aggregated patterns — such as how often a particular kind of request is misunderstood — to make the service work better.

The business you called is responsible for your information; we handle it for them. The Privacy Policy explains how to access, correct or delete it.

7Human review

People at Be Digital Limited may listen to or read a small number of calls, but only:

• when a customer reports a problem and we need to diagnose it,
• when we are investigating a security, abuse or safety issue, or
• where the law requires it.

Access is limited to staff who need it, and it is logged. We do not routinely listen to calls.

8Accents, speech differences and fairness

Speech recognition does not perform equally well for everyone. Accents, speech impairments, some languages and background noise all make it harder, and that is a real limitation rather than an edge case — New Zealand and Australia are full of accents that general-purpose models handle less well.

What we do about it:

• We choose speech models on how well they perform on New Zealand and Australian speech.
• Bea asks a caller to repeat or spell something rather than guessing when she is unsure.
• A caller who is not getting anywhere can ask for a person, and should be transferred or called back.
• We treat repeated recognition failure as a bug to fix, not an acceptable cost.

If Bea consistently fails to understand you, we want to know: sales@bedigital.co.nz.

9If you are a caller

• You can ask whether you are speaking to an AI, and you will be told the truth.
• You can ask to be put through to a person, or to be called back.
• You can decline to give information. Bea should not press you.
• You can ask the business to delete what was captured about you, or contact us at sales@bedigital.co.nz and we will help make that happen.
• If recording is on and you are not comfortable with it, say so and ask for a different way to contact the business.

10Our commitments

• Never deny being an AI. If asked, Bea tells the truth, always.
• No decisions about people. We will not build assessment, scoring or screening of individuals into the receptionist.
• Keep a human path open. Callers can always ask for a person.
• Fix what we find. When Bea gets something wrong in a way that matters, we treat it as a defect.
• Say what changes. If how the AI works changes materially, this page changes with it.

Questions or concerns about how we are using AI are genuinely welcome at sales@bedigital.co.nz.