I made 35 phone calls in German. Four people stayed on the line.
Week four of building Doch.
30 Oct 2026
Doch has now phoned 35 real German businesses. Twenty-six had a person pick up, and only four of them stayed on the line. This post is about the first five seconds: where an AI voice agent loses people, whether changing the opening helps, and what I can’t say yet.
35 businesses called, 26 had a person pick up, 4 stayed on the line, 9 never reached a person, 2 of them voice assistants.
“Stayed” means they heard the question and answered it.
How I ran the calls
Until now Doch had only called friends playing receptionists. Praxis Atmaca on 15 October was the first real errand, a prescription for Bisma. The real run came on 23 and 30 October: pharmacies, bike shops, hotels, nail salons, a florist. I picked each business by hand, and Claude read every ElevenLabs transcript and logged the call in a sheet, tagged by where it ended.
Who picked up, across all 35 calls. Both voice assistants talked back.
Most people leave at the AI line
Doch has to say it’s an AI (EU AI Act, Article 50), so every call hits the same gate. After the hello, it says it’s a digital voice assistant and asks if it may ask a quick question. That sentence is where the funnel narrows. Of the 26 people who picked up, 14 hung up during it, 3 more left at the question before it, and 4 stayed.
Two of the nine weren’t people at all. Hotel MOA and Dicke Wirtin answered with their own voice assistants, and both talked back: one quoted room prices, the other offered a table at 18:00 or 20:15. That’s 2 of 2, so a lead, not a rule, since both businesses chose to run one. The friction sits on the human side, at the moment someone learns they’re talking to a machine.
The 26 people who picked up, by how the call ended.
Changing the opening barely moved the drop-off
The opening is a branch in my server, not in the prompt. If the greeting already names the business, Doch skips ahead and says the AI line with the name in it. If not, it first asks a check question, “Spreche ich mit …?”, to catch wrong numbers, and the AI line comes after the yes.
Across 15 and 23 October, 1 of 8 people stayed. After the change, 3 of 15 did. Neither opening changed the drop-off much: most people still left within seconds of the AI line.
People by opening: 8 on 15 and 23 October, and 15 on 30 October.
Within 30 October, the named greeting did better than check first: 3 of 9 stayed, against 0 of 6. That isn’t proof, since a gap that size turns up about 2 times in 10 by chance and I picked the businesses. The check question also caught only one wrong number, while 3 of 6 check-first people hung up on it before Doch reached the AI line. A step meant to protect the call became a second gate.
Most hang-ups land within six seconds
On 30 October, eleven people hung up on Doch. Nine of them did it between two and six seconds in, often mid-sentence.
Hang-ups on 30 October, in two-second bins.
That’s shorter than the AI line, so reply speed never gets a chance to matter. I suspect people react to the voice, or to an unknown mobile number, before the words land. Only the audio can tell.
The four who stayed
The people who stayed were small, local places: a doctor’s practice, a pharmacy, a hotel and a bike shop. Each question had a one-sentence answer, whether a price, a yes or no, or an email address. Here is the bike shop, Fahrradhaus Haske, start to finish. The briefing runs at double speed and the ringing at four times, and the call itself is real time. It’s a screen recording with no call audio.
Briefing, plan, call and summary for the Fahrradhaus Haske call. Screen recording, no call audio.
A routine question, answered by name, in one sentence: that was the pattern. The type of business alone didn’t predict who stayed.
When Doch has to ask me
Needs you is the sheet that slides up on my phone when Doch hits something that isn’t in the plan. At Honigmond Hotel the person said reception was closed and asked for the request by email. Doch said “Einen Moment bitte” and held the line. The sheet showed the question, why Doch was asking, and what they’d said in German. I answered about nine seconds into a 30-second countdown, and Doch read the address back.
The Needs you sheet during the Honigmond Hotel call, through to the summary. Screen recording, no call audio.
It held again at Dicke Wirtin, for about 10 seconds. Both businesses waited, but I answered fast, so how long a receptionist will hold is still untested.
Latency: about 0.8 seconds a reply
From ElevenLabs’ own timings on ten German calls, across 31 replies, the model took a median of 0.79 seconds, between 0.55 and 0.96. The voice needed about 0.09 seconds to start and speech recognition about 0.07. That isn’t the silence a person hears, which also includes the wait for them to finish speaking. I haven’t measured that from the audio.
What I tested, and what I haven’t
Disclosure: who stays after “I’m an AI”?
Tested
4 of 26 stayed.
Confidence and escalation: asking me when it has to
Tested
Needs you worked twice.
Hold tolerance
Partly
Two holds, both waited.
Latency
Partly
About 0.8 s per model reply. The silence a person hears isn’t measured.
Intent preview, action audit and undo, and interruption didn’t get a proper test. No call reached a booking, and nobody has been asked how the voice sounds.
Where I pushed back on Claude
The opening used to ask permission to record the call. Calls ended at that question, so on 30 October I dropped it. Doch no longer asks to record, audio is kept for a day and deleted by hand after I’ve listened, and the transcript stays for about 30 days.
Key takeaways
The AI line is where people leave. 14 of 26 left during it, 3 more at the check question, and 4 stayed.
Changing the opening barely moved it. 1 of 8 (13%) stayed before the change and 3 of 15 (20%) after.
The check question costs more than it saves. It caught one wrong number, and 3 of 6 check-first people hung up on it.
Hang-ups are fast. 9 of the 11 on 30 October came 2 to 6 seconds in.
The people who stayed had a cheap question to answer.
Voice assistants didn’t mind. 2 of 2 carried on.
Replies took about 0.8 seconds. That’s model time only.
Escalation held the call. Needs you worked twice. Hold tolerance is untested.
What came next
Calls end today, because Doch only phones on weekdays and the hard stop is 1 November. Before then I’m fixing what the calls showed: digits in names (“Phone Profi 24” came out as “zwanzig vier”), the end_call tool that fails on some goodbyes, and the line that promises “Akber will get back to you”, which nothing backs up. Next is the case study, which has to be honest about a sample this small.
If you run a small business in Germany and an AI has ever called you, I’d like to know what you’d have wanted it to say first.