---
title: "Voice AI is a major unlock for the expert services industry"
description: "Expert services in India have always been sold over the phone. Voice AI can now have that conversation, and providers are asking us to let it do the selling. We think this is the e-commerce moment for expert services."
canonical: https://mytribe.in/blog/voice-ai-for-expert-services
authors: Kushank Poddar and Ugam Kamat
published: 2026-11-03
last_updated: 2026-11-03
---

# Voice AI is a major unlock for the expert services industry

By Kushank Poddar and Ugam Kamat · 3 November 2026 · 9 min read

**Summary.**

Expert services in India have always been sold over the phone. A decorator, a photographer or a garden designer spends hours talking to every customer before anything gets booked. Platforms tried to fix this with listings and filters, and it never worked. Voice AI can now have that conversation, and in many cases it does it better than the providers themselves, which is why providers are asking us to let it do the selling. We think this is the e-commerce moment for expert services: booking the right photographer is about to become as easy as buying a book online.

## Expert services are sold over the phone

Some services fit neatly into an app. A plumber, an electrician, an AC service, a spa session or a maid has a known scope and a known price. You pick a slot and the app sends someone.

![Left: a man books a plumber with one tap and the plumber is already at the door with his toolbox. Right: a mother on her sofa, surrounded by thought bubbles with question marks over a balloon arch, a cake, money, a date, a camera, a magician and a venue](https://assets.mytribe.in/insecure/rs:fit:1200:0/f:jpg/plain/s3://mytribe-assets-production/site/blog/voice-ai-for-expert-services/commodity-vs-expert-e89a17b111.jpg)

*Booking a plumber takes one tap. Booking a first birthday starts with a dozen questions. (Illustration made with AI.)*

Expert services don't work like that. A maternity shoot, a first birthday, a Ganpati stage at home or a balcony garden is different every time, and most customers have never booked one before. They don't know what's possible or what it should cost. Somebody has to explain the options, understand what they want and put a price on it, and in this industry that has always happened on the phone.

Providers deal with this every day. The founder of a maternity photo studio in Bengaluru told us:

> "We get lots of enquiries on Instagram, but closing them has been my biggest headache. Every customer needs to be told everything: what's included, what to wear, what happens on the day. They need to be put at ease. So I've hired one person just for this, with a salary and a good incentive on every booking, and she costs us 10 to 15% of everything we spend. That's before a single rupee on marketing."
>
> Founder of a maternity photo studio, Bengaluru

Even when a provider hires someone to take the calls, the hard questions still come back to the owner. The founder of a balcony garden studio in Delhi NCR told us:

> "My team takes the first call, but the final details always come back to me: can we do it, what will it cost, what are the terms. Most of my time goes into this, and I can't grow the business even though the demand is there."
>
> Founder of a balcony garden studio, Delhi NCR

We did it this way too. When mytribe started, a team of people called every customer to understand what they wanted.

## Why platforms couldn't fix this so far

Platforms before us tried to sell expert services the way you sell products, with listings, filters and star ratings. It never really took off, because so much of what a customer wants comes down to taste. "Grand, like a temple" or "a soft day, just the two of us" won't fit in a filter. If you squeeze a birthday into "decorator, ₹10,000 to ₹20,000, 4 stars and above", you take the soul out of it, and customers end up scrolling through options that don't feel like theirs.

So most of this business moved to Instagram, where people could at least see the work. But every enquiry there still ends in a phone call. Booking an expert as easily as you order something online has stayed a pipe dream.

## Voice AI is what the market was waiting for

Think about how a customer books a decorator today. She messages five of them on Instagram. One replies in two hours, another in six, a third asks her to call, and the fourth never replies. Each one asks her the same questions again, and a simple birthday ends up taking her whole week.

![Left: a tired mother at her table late at night, staring at her phone, surrounded by unanswered messages, clocks and torn calendar pages. Right: the same mother relaxed on her sofa on one phone call, cup of tea in hand, as three birthday decoration options arrive](https://assets.mytribe.in/insecure/rs:fit:1200:0/f:jpg/plain/s3://mytribe-assets-production/site/blog/voice-ai-for-expert-services/booking-before-and-voice-7bf88af3b9.jpg)

*Booking a decorator today, and on one call. (Illustration made with AI.)*

Providers don't want this either. They would rather spend their day on the work than on calls with people who may never book. People have got used to booking a hotel, a table at a restaurant or a new phone in a few taps, and this industry has been waiting a long time for the same experience.

This year voice AI got good enough to give it to them. It sounds natural, answers quickly, speaks Indian English and Hinglish, and costs very little per call. It can talk to the customer in her own words at any hour, which a filter never could.

At mytribe, customers used to chat with our AI on WhatsApp. Calling them was the natural next step, so we launched it this year. We decided to build the calling system ourselves, because the ready-made ones we tried couldn't handle our kind of conversation. [Our engineering article](https://mytribe.in/blog/how-we-made-our-ai-sound-like-a-person) explains how we built it.

## The market lapped it up

When someone messages mytribe, the AI asks whether they'd like a call or would rather keep chatting. We expected most people to stay on chat, but about half of them choose the call. And 8% of customers don't wait to be asked: they ring our number themselves, and the AI picks up.

**Call or chat, side by side**

| | Call | Chat |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Customers who give us their complete requirement | 65% | 36% |
| Time it takes to get those details | under 3 min | 36 min |

Call time is the median call. Chat time is measured from the customer's first message.

They talk to it in whatever language they like, and it answers in the same one: 82% of calls are in English, 13% in Hinglish and the rest in Hindi and Kannada.

**Languages on our calls**

| Language | Share of calls |
| --- | --- |
| English | 82% |
| Hinglish | 13% |
| Hindi and Kannada | 5% |

We also found that customers tell the AI things they would never type into a form. Here are six moments from real calls, lightly trimmed and anonymised:

### Proposal at home (Bengaluru · English)

**Customer:** "...floating candles through strings, as well as Polaroid photos, because my girlfriend is a Harry Potter fan."

**mytribe AI:** "I have got the picture. A large red rose petal heart with a white border in front of the curtains, LED candles around it, red balloons, and Polaroids with a subtle Harry Potter touch."

### Terrace garden (Mumbai · Hindi)

**Customer:** "Main naya hoon, mujhe zyada nahi maloom, aapka knowledge lagega. Oopar se dhak dena, aisa lagna chahiye ki green house hai." (I'm new to this, I need your knowledge. Cover it from above so it feels like a greenhouse.)

**mytribe AI:** "Madhumalti, Allamanda aur Aparajita jaise fast-growing creepers achhe rahenge. Aapko zyada flowering chahiye ya sirf ghani greenery?" (Fast-growing creepers like Madhumalti, Allamanda and Aparajita would work. Do you want more flowers, or just thick greenery?)

**Customer:** "I appreciate you."

### Ganpati stage (Hinglish)

**Customer:** "Thoda sa grand hona chahiye, temple decoration ki tarah. Artistic, pillars vagairah, purane style ke." (It should feel a bit grand, like a temple. Artistic, with pillars, in the old style.)

**mytribe AI:** "Samajh gaya, aapko thoda grand, temple style ka setup chahiye, artistic pillars aur purane style ke look ke saath." (Got it, a grand temple-style setup with artistic pillars and an old-style look.)

### A son's first birthday (English)

**Customer:** "A game for couples, a game for men, a game for women, to make that event interactive, joyful, enjoyable, rather than just to visit there, wish, have food and go back."

### A son's fifth birthday (English)

**Customer:** "The kids have a lot of energy. Magic show I had kept last year, so don't want to do it again. Return gift activity I had done before... so if you have something different, please let me know."

### A surprise dance for the groom (English)

**Customer:** "My right leg has twisted, so according to that I want easy steps, so that I can dance."

**mytribe AI:** "That is doable, but the routine should avoid jumps, fast turns and deep bends."

## The surprise: providers want the AI to do the selling

We expected providers to guard every customer like gold. A customer is the most valuable thing a small business has, and we thought they'd want every conversation for themselves and keep any AI system well away from it.

It's been the opposite. Providers tell us, more or less in these words: "Let the AI talk to the customer. Just give us the final job, with everything already discussed. Please don't make us talk to them." Many ask us to take a fee and do all the selling for them.

That's no criticism of providers. They're experts at their craft, and for most of them selling is a second job. When the phone rings, a photographer is usually in the middle of a shoot and a decorator is up a ladder, so the call gets rushed or missed. Many of them don't enjoy long calls, and very few have a system to follow up on every enquiry. A lot of them also built their business speaking Hindi or their own language, and a customer who wants every question answered patiently in English can be hard work.

Providers think of the AI as a talented employee they've hired to represent their business, one who has read everything.

- **It's always there.** It picks up at 11am and at 11pm, and has the same energy on the hundredth call of the day as on the first.
- **It knows the business and keeps learning.** It has seen the provider's interview with us, their past quotes and a lot of their past conversations, so it knows what they do and what they don't. If a provider wants something done differently, they tell it on WhatsApp and it does it that way from the next call.
- **It tailors everything to the customer.** It works out what each customer is after and shows them work that fits. If someone getting married in a church asks whether a makeup artist has done a Christian bridal look before, the AI finds those photos and sends them during the call. Then it puts together a proposal around that customer's brief while they're still interested.
- **It follows through.** It checks in before the event, tells the customer anything they need to sort out in advance, and asks how it went afterwards. A provider in the middle of a busy season rarely has time for that.

It doesn't sell better on every call yet. Providers can see where it's going, and so can we, but there are still calls where a good provider would have done better. We work through those every week, and the gap is closing fast.

## This is the e-commerce moment for expert services

Think about buying a book before Amazon. You went to a shop, asked if they had it, waited while someone checked the back, and maybe went to a second shop. Now you order it on your phone and it comes to you. Or think about a small seller in Surat before Meesho. She needed a shop, a counter and a lot of patience for every walk-in customer. Now she lists her sarees online and spends her time making them.

Voice AI does the same for expert services, for the people buying and the people selling.

**For the customer,** it's one conversation, in her own words, about what she actually wants, and options from providers who fit arrive on her WhatsApp while she's still on the call, so there's nobody to chase. Every one of those providers has been vetted by us. We interview them, check what they tell us against their work, and only keep the good ones.

**For the provider,** it means getting a customer who has already explained what she wants, without hiring someone to close her. Selling costs a provider real money, 10 to 15% of costs in the maternity studio's case, and a platform like mytribe can do it far more cheaply.

E-commerce also made the market bigger, because people started buying things they would never have gone to a shop for. We expect the same here: when booking an expert is this easy, people will book one for occasions they used to manage on their own.

We want mytribe to be at the centre of this. That means knowing each provider's business and learning from every conversation and every booking, so that buying and selling an expert service gets easier for both sides.

## What's ahead, and what isn't solved yet

- **For now, the answer is people and AI together.** These are early days for trust in AI. The AI does the whole job, but customers should know there's a person behind it, especially on big jobs, because not everyone is comfortable with a new technology yet. Any conversation can be passed to someone on our team, and on jobs above ₹50,000 a person joins anyway.
- **It still makes mistakes.** The AI sometimes mishears names and places on a phone line, and some calls go wrong. We fix them one by one and the models keep getting better. The engineering article shows a few of these calls.

These are exciting times for this industry. One of its biggest sources of friction is going away, and we think the e-commerce moment for expert services has arrived. Within a few years, we expect most expert services in India to be booked this way.

*Numbers come from mytribe's own records. Customer quotes are anonymised and lightly trimmed.*