This is Joy

Empowering small businesses to grow through better cutomer service

Cutting-edge AI technology meets human empathy

Every company needs the right tools to grow. To scale your business and meet customer service demands, you have to be there when customers call. That’s why we created Joy—a pioneering AI-driven answering service solution built by the #1 live operator answering service.

For years, Specialty Answering Service has been committed to building the best answering service—one we use ourselves, created by and for small businesses. We take pride in delivering products and solutions that help solve communication challenges and anticipate businesses’ evolving needs. That’s why we developed Joy: a front-end AI receptionist that works alongside live, human-powered customer service.

Who we are

Innovators Redefining Customer Connections

Over the past 25 years, we’ve brought an amazing live-operator telephone answering service to market for small businesses. We’ve innovated by providing on-demand reporting, allowing real-time adjustments to message routing, and created an online gateway to control your call center script—where any changes you make are instantly visible to agents. None of this development is due to luck; it’s the result of careful choices based on our customers’ needs.

We are live answering service experts, platform builders, and customers ourselves. Investing in a better experience for our clients led to the development of Joy. We believe an AI receptionist, combined with a live operator receptionist, is the best way to deliver choice to your callers and value to your business.

Our focus is always on what’s best for our customers and their customers. This approach has connected us with thousands of businesses around the world.

Our mission

We're on a mission to simplify AI receptionist outsourcing for millions of small businesses

Small businesses thrive with the right customer service strategy – that’s where we help. As a leading provider of live operator and AI-powered answering services, we empower small businesses to succeed.

Since 1985, we’ve helped thousands of businesses unlock the power of live support to build trust, capture more opportunities, and grow. Today, success means the ability to blend AI automation and human connection. Let’s work together to take your business to the next level.

Knowing where we came from

A brief history of Voice AI customer service

Voice AI customer service has evolved dramatically over the past few decades, transforming how businesses interact with customers. Early systems in the 1990s relied on Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, which used pre-recorded messages and basic touch-tone menu navigation.

The 2010s marked a major shift with advancements in AI and natural language processing (NLP). Companies like Google, Amazon, and IBM developed AI-driven voice assistants capable of understanding and responding to human speech more naturally. These improvements led to the rise of AI-powered customer service solutions that could handle complex inquiries, route calls intelligently, and even engage in conversational interactions.

Today, voice AI solutions like Joy by Specialty Answering Service are more sophisticated than ever, blending speech recognition, machine learning, and sentiment analysis to create seamless customer experiences. Our hybrid model is an innovation combining AI with live agents, ensuring efficiency while maintaining a human touch.

Our culture and values

Finding Joy in your business' success

Joy voice AI is easy to onboard and effective for small and medium-sized companies as well as enterprise scale customers. We empower all businesses to unlock their potential and scale their customer service with an easy-to-use and easy to customize AI customer service + live operator solution.

With Joy, you can easily use AI to manage inbound customer service requests, and use live operators for callers who want the empathy of human voice. You focus on growing your business, we’ll focus on a great experience for your callers.

Bold Innovation

Your AI receptionist works for you, and not the other way around. Every feature and configuration option is designed with ease of use in mind for you to deliver the best experience to your customers.

Customer Obsession

Your customers’ satisfaction and your success is at the heart of everything we do. We are committed to helping businesses deliver best-in-class customer support by mixing AI and live agents. When you win, we win!

Transparency and Trust

Data transparency is at the core of our company, and an essential part of our platform. We provide complete data on every AI voice interaction, including transcripts, recordings, who we notified, and more.