The boring version, on purpose.

Which part runs where

A call is not one system. It is a phone network, a voice, a model working out what to say, a database, and a text message, and they do not all sit in the same country. So we have split it up.

• United States
  The phone line and the voice. In the United States. Your Jessie number and the audio of the call are handled there, and so are two steps behind it: the voice you hear is generated in the US, and what your caller says gets turned into text there as well. We would rather that ran from an Australian region. It does not yet.
• United States
  The words she says back. Worked out by an AI system based in the United States. We have not pinned its processing to one country, so treat the words of a call as leaving New Zealand. What we can point you at is its own written commitment: retained data is never used to train a model without express permission. We have not given it.
• Australia (Sydney)
  Everything that gets stored. Sydney, three ways. Your leads, the call transcripts, your settings and your sign-in sit in a Postgres database in Sydney (Amazon’s ap-southeast-2). The server that answers your calls and the dashboard you log in to both run in Sydney as well. Storage is the part that sticks around, and what we store, we store here. That is not the same as saying your caller’s words never leave: they pass through phone, voice and AI systems in the United States while the call is happening, and how long those hold them is set by their own policy, not by our database.
• New Zealand
  The text that tells you about a lead. The message is written on our Sydney server and handed to a New Zealand company, who send it from an ordinary New Zealand mobile number. Your customer can save that number like any other contact. No overseas gateway touches it.
• United States
  The email that tells you about a lead. The same lead, by email, goes out through an American email service. It carries the caller’s name, number and what the job is, because an alert with none of that in it would be no use to you.
• United States
  Your subscription and your card. An American payments processor runs the payment and holds the card. We never see a card number: the card screen belongs to that processor, not us, so the digits never pass through anything we wrote. This is your billing information, not your callers’.
• Nothing of yours is here
  This website. A global content network serves these pages. There is no form here that sends us anything about one of your customers, so nothing of theirs is ever on this side of the product.

The honest summary: what we store, we store in Sydney. What happens live, while the call is going, runs through providers in the United States, because the voice and the model we use are not available from an Australasian region yet. The text that reaches your phone is written in Sydney and sent from New Zealand, without touching a US system. If that changes, we will move it and say so here.

New Zealand law does let information go overseas, on a condition: the party receiving it has to be under comparable safeguards. That is privacy principle 12. Every part of a call above lists the country it happens in, so you can weigh that against the safeguards New Zealand law requires instead of taking our word for it.

What every caller is told, before they say a word

Jessie’s greeting carries this sentence on every call she answers, spoken before the caller has said anything:

“Just so you know, this call may be recorded.”

It is not optional and an owner cannot turn it off. Write your own greeting and we put the sentence back in. That is the Privacy Act 2020 doing its job, and it is also why the transcript in your dashboard is worth having: the customer was told. Ask her outright whether she is a person and she is built to say she is an AI, not one. That second one is worded carefully on purpose: the phone system itself speaks the recording line and an owner cannot edit it out, while the answer about being an AI is an instruction Jessie is given. They are not the same kind of promise, so we will not dress one up as the other.

What we keep, and for how long

What Jessie takes off a call is written down first. The transcript and the lead are what stay; the audio is the one thing with a clock on it.

• The transcript of every call she answers, and the lead details Jessie wrote down. Yours to read in the dashboard.
• The recording of the call, where there is one, for 90 days. After that the audio is deleted and the transcript stays. You can delete a recording yourself from the call page before then.
• Your business settings: the greeting, your hours, what you told Jessie to ask.
• Your Google Calendar token, if you connected one, encrypted. Disconnect it in Settings and it is deleted on the spot.
• How many minutes you used, so the bill adds up. The card itself belongs to our payments processor, not us.

We hold it while your account is live, plus a reasonable stretch after you cancel, because a job you did in March can turn into a question in September. Want it gone sooner? Email [email protected] and ask. We will delete it and tell you when it is done. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

That is what we keep. The AI provider that works out what Jessie says keeps something too, and we would rather you heard it here. The words of the call are what its model is answering, so they reach its systems in the United States, and its own policy for business customers says it deletes inputs and outputs within 30 days of receiving them, or holds them up to 2 years if its automated safety systems flag a conversation as breaking its usage policy. We have no special arrangement that shortens that.

Who you are dealing with

JessieAnswers is a trading name of Web Infinity NZ Limited, a registered New Zealand company. Its NZBN is 9429031766906, so you can check it against the register yourself instead of taking our word for it. Your callers’ information is handled under the Privacy Act 2020. Every price on this site is in New Zealand dollars and includes GST. Nothing gets 15% bigger at checkout. The only thing that lands on top of the plan price is the extra minutes you actually use, and the pricing page says what a minute costs.

Something here you want explained, or something you think is wrong? Email [email protected]. A person reads it.