HeyDesk™

Every small business owner knows the pain: you're cutting hair, serving tables, or on a job site—and the phone rings. You can't answer. The caller won't leave a voicemail. That's a customer lost.

Hiring a receptionist costs $30k+/year. IVR menus ("Press 1 for...") drive 50% of callers away. Existing AI solutions sound robotic and miss the emotional nuances that make customers feel heard.

We built HeyDesk™ because we believed AI could do better—not just understand WHAT customers say, but HOW they feel. When someone calls frustrated, the agent should slow down and empathize. When they're in a hurry, get to the point fast.

Our approach evolved significantly during development. We started with traditional STT/TTS pipelines, but they felt disconnected. Then we discovered Niimi's empathic AI together with Hume EVI—speech-to-speech with real-time emotion from voice prosody and video face analysis detection baked in.

The technical journey was intense: we rewrote our architecture three times, experimented with animated avatars before landing on a cleaner voice-first design, and spent hours crafting the emotional intelligence.

Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding assistant) was instrumental in this process—helping us refactor, debug race conditions in our emotion monitoring, and maintain clean architecture as the codebase evolved rapidly. From initial concept to prototype in under three days.

The result: AI agents that small businesses can set up in 5 minutes, that sound natural, and that make customers feel heard—not handled.