Why a Welsh voice agent answers the phone better than a London call-centre

We built Bryn to answer calls for a Snowdonia outdoor company. Before Bryn, missed calls cost the client roughly £400 a week in lost bookings — people phoning on a Tuesday evening when the owner was out on a hike.

Eleven Llanrwsts

Welsh place names are not in most speech-to-text training sets. Llanrwst came back as eleven different spellings across six different AI providers. Betws-y-Coed was worse. When your booking agent mishears a location and books someone for the wrong trailhead, you have a very annoyed hiker and a refund request.

We tried three commercial voice APIs before building a pronunciation dictionary ourselves. The dictionary now covers 340 Welsh place names, common Welsh first names, and Welsh-English code-switching patterns — the kind where a caller slips into Welsh mid-sentence and back out again.

What actually changed the results

Two things moved the needle more than anything else:

• Call recordings, not scripts. We trained on 600 real calls from the client, not synthetic data. Real callers say "have you got anything for Saturday" not "I would like to make a booking for Saturday the fourteenth."
• Handoff logic. Bryn does not try to handle everything. When a caller is clearly upset or has a non-standard request, Bryn says "let me get the owner to call you back within the hour" and logs it. That handoff alone saved three one-star reviews in the first month.

The numbers after three weeks

Eighty bookings taken after hours. Zero missed calls that ended without a resolution. The owner stopped checking his phone every evening.

The cost to run Bryn is £180 a month. The £400-a-week leak is gone.

If you run a business that takes calls and you are regularly unavailable evenings or weekends, the calculation is simple: what is a missed call worth to you, and how many are you missing? We can walk you through that number in 30 minutes.