Managed Agents / Multilingual AI phone agent / AI receptionist for Canada
#1 on EVA-BenchEVA-Bench is ServiceNow's independent benchmark for voice agents in enterprise workflows like customer support. It scores each agent on how accurately it completes the task and on the caller's experience.
#1 on Speech Agent ArenaSpeech Agent Arena is Artificial Analysis' independent benchmark for grading speech to speech models on enterprise tasks using human evaluators.
AI receptionist for Canada that picks up in French and follows callers into English.
Coralie answers the phone for a property manager in Gatineau. She greets every caller in French, answers office questions from the facts you give her, books apartment viewings, takes messages and puts a leak or a gas smell through to maintenance.
Trusted by leading teams
Ranked #1
on EVA-Bench and Speech Agent Arena
A virtual receptionist that starts in French
French is the default from the first word. An English-speaking tenant gets English as soon as they use it, with language detection turned on.
Office hours, the rent due date and how to pay come from the facts in the instruction. Coralie says she doesn't know rather than invent a parking rule you never wrote down.
Coralie offers only the slots your calendar returns, then reads the day, the time and the address back before she books.
With language detection on, Coralie answers in the language she hears. A tenant who starts in English gets English for the rest of the call, and the message records that.
A request Coralie can't answer becomes a message with the name, the number, the unit and the language, so the person who calls back knows which one to use.
The instruction names three triggers: a water leak, no heat and a smell of gas. Any of them goes straight to maintenance on call, and a gas smell gets a safety instruction first. Change the list to match your own on-call rules.
French service, privacy and recording in Quebec
A Quebec office that puts an AI agent on its line runs into the French language Charter, the province's privacy act and the federal rule on recording calls.
Service in French
Section 5 of Quebec's Charter of the French language says consumers have a right to be informed and served in French. Section 50.2, added by Bill 96 in 2022, says an enterprise offering goods or services to consumers must respect that right. Coralie greets every caller in French and moves to English only after the caller speaks it.
Privacy (Law 25)
Section 8 of Quebec's private-sector privacy act, as amended by Law 25, lists what a business tells a person when it collects their information, including the purpose and whether it may be communicated outside Québec. Section 17 calls for a privacy impact assessment before it is. Ask Cartesia where call data is processed and stored.
Recording calls
Criminal Code section 184 makes intercepting a private communication an offence. Section 184(2)(a) exempts a person who has the consent of either party. The federal privacy commissioner's PIPEDA guidance says to tell callers about a recording and why before it starts. An agent-wide setting stops Cartesia storing recordings, transcripts and caller numbers.
Criminal Code, section 184; OPC: Recording of customer telephone calls
Voices
Cartesia has 35 Canadian French voices, and the sample uses one called Coralie. Play your own greeting, unit numbers and street names through the voice you pick, and have someone from the office who grew up in Quebec listen.
These notes summarize the statutes and are not legal advice. Have a Quebec lawyer look at Coralie's greeting, your recording notice and where call data goes before you go live.
Built on best-in-class speech models
Cartesia handles listening, turn-taking and interruptions. You bring the instructions, the LLM and the tools.
- $0.03per minute
- #1on Speech Agent Arena and EVA-Bench
- 24/7answers every call, at any hour
Natural turn-taking
The agent lets callers finish, handles interruptions and pauses, and never talks over anyone.
Your choice of LLM and tools
Pick the LLM that is best suited for your agent's job, and give it tools to take action.
A voice that fits your brand
Pick from a library of natural, expressive voices so every call sounds like your company.
Check that every message says which language to call back in
After each call, Cartesia reads the transcript and asks whether a message left by the caller notes their language. A false is a message your staff may return in the wrong one.
Launch your Quebec front desk in three steps
Start buildingClone the template
Copy this use case into your Cartesia account and edit the instructions to match your policies.
Connect your systems
Connect the agent to the systems it needs, then give it a Cartesia phone number or bring your own.
Test the agent, then go live
Place test calls from the browser, read the transcripts, and score calls with your own metrics.
Enterprise-grade security
HIPAA compliant

SOC 2 Type 2

GDPR
AI receptionist for Canada FAQs
What does an AI receptionist for Canada do?
It answers your office line in French and English. The one on this page works for a property manager in Gatineau: it answers questions about hours and rent from your facts, books apartment viewings, takes messages that note the caller's language and transfers urgent repairs.
How is it different from a virtual receptionist service?
A virtual receptionist service in Canada usually puts a person on your line and bills per call or per month. This one is an AI agent. It answers at any hour, follows only the instruction you write, and passes the calls you name to your staff.
What does it cost?
You pay $0.03/min for the agent, plus telephony and LLM usage, and a call in French costs the same as one in English. The full breakdown is on pricing.
Does it answer in French first?
Yes. The instruction on this page tells Coralie to greet every caller in French. She switches only when the caller speaks English.
How does it follow a caller from French to English?
Language detection does that. It is a Beta setting in the agent's speech settings and covers ten languages, French and English among them. Turning it on swaps the speech recognition model from Ink-2 to Deepgram Flux, so test it with your own callers. Ink-2 on its own transcribes French and English, but holds one language per call. The sample line stays in French the whole time.
Will it sound Québécois?
It sounds like the voice you pick. Cartesia has 35 Canadian French voices, and you can also choose a voice from France. The sample uses a Canadian French one.
Can I keep my office number?
Yes. Set your carrier to forward calls to the agent's number. Transfers to maintenance or your staff work when the agent's number is on Twilio or a SIP trunk.
Who sets it up?
Someone in the office writes the greeting, the office facts and the urgent-call rules. Viewings and messages reach your calendar or property management software through webhooks, which someone who can code wires up once. There is no built-in connector to a particular product.
Can I turn off call recording?
Yes, for the whole agent. One setting stops Cartesia storing transcripts, recordings and caller numbers on every call to it. You can't switch it off for a single call.
Does it work for an office on the Ottawa side?
Yes. The agent works the same way in Ontario. If most of your callers start in English, write the greeting in English and let detection pick up French. The French-service notes above are about Quebec law.
Find your voice
Talk to an expert.
Connect with a member of our team and learn how Cartesia can help you build world-class voice experiences.
Start building.
Access our models via API and bring an agent into production with our SDKs and developer tools.
We’re hiring!
Build the future of interactive intelligence
Careers page



