Your translators translate. We answer the phone while they do. Every inbound call a project manager handles — a quote request, a scope clarification, a general enquiry — is time pulled from billable work at a blended rate of £40 to £80 per hour. The ATC's UK Language Services Industry Report identifies margin pressure and operational overhead as primary concerns for UK translation agencies in 2025. An AI receptionist for translation agencies built on Eldris Voice captures that inbound call layer — qualifying scope, routing to the right PM, booking callbacks, and answering standard enquiries — so the person on the other end of Trados or Plunet can stay there. This is not a conversation about replacing translators. It is a conversation about what it costs when they spend their time on the phone.
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The phone call is the most expensive thing in your agency
Translation agencies run on billable time. Project managers at UK agencies typically bill at a blended rate of £40 to £80 per hour, based on UK professional services salary data and standard agency overhead calculations. Senior translators billing directly operate at similar or higher rates when on chargeable work. Every minute a PM or translator spends answering the phone is a minute not billed.
The maths is direct. Assume ten inbound enquiry calls per week, averaging eight minutes each — quote requests, document scope questions, turnaround clarifications, language pair availability checks. That is 80 minutes per week, or roughly 5.5 hours per month, of PM or translator time consumed by inbound phone handling. At the lower end of the blended rate — £40 per hour — that is £220 per month in direct labour cost for answering the phone. At £60 per hour, it is £330. At £80 per hour, it is £440.
The Eldris Voice Growth tier costs £997 per month. At the lower PM blended rate of £40 per hour, ten calls per week at eight minutes each is £220 per month of labour cost. The service costs £997 per month. The net question is not whether this saves money — it is whether ten calls per week is a conservative or generous assumption for your agency. Most principals who count their actual call volume find it is conservative.
This calculation does not include the second-order cost: the disruption cost. A PM pulled off a time-sensitive medical document translation to answer a routine quote enquiry does not just lose eight minutes. They lose re-entry time, attention, and the compound productivity of uninterrupted work. That cost does not appear on a timesheet. It appears in overtime, missed deadlines, and PM retention figures.
The PM time reclaimed — hour by hour
This section is formatted for quick reference.
Translation agency inbound phone ROI: the numbers in plain figures
A UK translation agency with a five-person team — two PMs and three translators — receives inbound enquiry calls throughout the working day. Calls arrive from existing clients chasing project updates, from new clients requesting quotes, from domestic businesses asking about certified translation requirements, and from overseas clients phoning in languages other than English.
Using conservative figures:
- 10 calls per week × 8 minutes average = 80 minutes per week of PM handling time
- 5.5 hours per month × £50 blended PM rate = £275 per month in unbilled PM time
- Eldris Voice Growth tier: £997 per month
- Net monthly saving at these figures: £275 − £997 = variable by tier price
At 15 calls per week — which is realistic for agencies handling ongoing client relationships alongside new business inbound — the monthly unbilled time rises to:
- 15 × 8 min × 4.3 weeks = 8.6 hours/month
- 8.6 hours × £50 = £430/month in direct labour cost
In addition: calls arriving outside office hours — evening or weekend international client calls — go unanswered entirely. The opportunity cost of missed project enquiries is not captured in the above figures but represents a further revenue risk for agencies with global client bases.
Service comparison: Plunet TMS starting licence cost typically exceeds £3,000 per year. XTRF and Memsource carry comparable annual costs. An AI receptionist at Growth tier is a smaller line item than any of these and addresses a gap none of them fill — the inbound phone layer.
PM time reclaimed is billable time restored. For an agency running at near-capacity on its translation team, recovering 5–8 hours of PM time per month is not a cost saving — it is a capacity increase, delivered without a hire.
Call the live demo line — 020 3769 0881 No form. No gatekeeper. Call it and ask it anything.
The objection you are probably forming right now
Here is the objection translation agency principals raise most often when they first encounter this product: "We use AI to help our translators. We are not going to let AI handle our client relationships."
That objection conflates two entirely separate things, and it is worth addressing directly.
Document translation is a skilled, regulated, liability-bearing professional service. The accurate transfer of legal text, medical records, certified documents, or literary work from one language to another requires a qualified translator — human judgement, domain expertise, professional accountability. Nothing about this product changes that. The ITI's professional standards for translators and the ATC's quality frameworks for member agencies apply to document work. Voice reception for inbound telephone enquiries is not document work.
When a client phones your agency to ask how much it costs to translate a 5,000-word contract from German to English, that is an information request. When a prospect phones to ask whether you handle certified translations, that is a routing question. When a new client phones to ask your turnaround time for a technical manual, that is a scope clarification. None of these require a qualified translator or a project manager to handle. They require an agent trained on your agency's pricing, service range, turnaround standards, language pairs, and certification capabilities.
That is precisely what Eldris Voice delivers: a domain-trained phone agent, built on your agency's actual data during onboarding, that handles the inbound layer your PMs are currently handling themselves. The translators keep translating. The PMs manage projects. The phone is handled.
The distinction matters: this is not AI for translation. It is AI reception for a translation agency. These are different layers of the same business, and only one of them benefits from automation at the phone level.
What the agent handles — and what it routes to a human
The agent is trained during onboarding on the agency's specific service catalogue. On a standard growth-tier deployment for a translation agency, the agent handles the following inbound call types without human intervention:
Standard quote requests. Callers describe a document type, language pair, and urgency level. The agent captures full scope — word count estimate if available, source and target languages, required certification status, delivery deadline — and either provides a guide price range from the agency's standard pricing or confirms that a PM will follow up with a detailed quote within a specified timeframe.
Language pair availability. The agent knows which language pairs the agency handles in-house and which are handled via trusted partner networks. Callers asking "do you do Mandarin to English certified translation?" receive a direct answer, not a "please hold while I check."
Turnaround and certification questions. Standard questions about working-day turnaround for document categories, certified translation requirements, and apostille or notarisation processes — all answerable from the agency's standard service data.
Project update calls from existing clients. Callers phoning to chase a project in progress are identified, the relevant PM is notified, and the caller is given a structured update based on the information available — or a clear callback confirmation if the PM needs to be directly involved.
Out-of-hours international inbound. Agencies with global client bases receive calls from clients in the US, Australia, Singapore, and elsewhere during UK evening and weekend hours. These calls are captured, structured, and routed to the relevant PM for first-thing action.
What the agent routes to a human: complex scope discussions requiring professional judgement, complaints requiring relationship management, clients who explicitly request to speak with their account PM, and enquiries outside the scope of the agency's standard service range.
The CAT tool ecosystem — where this fits
Translation agencies already buy software. Plunet and XTRF handle project management and vendor assignment. Memsource and Trados manage translation memory, glossary management, and quality assurance workflows. memoQ handles collaborative translation and review. These tools are the operational backbone of a serious translation business.
None of them handle the inbound phone. Plunet's client portal requires clients to log in. XTRF routes work through email and portal. Trados is a CAT tool — it does not answer calls. The gap between a client phoning and that enquiry landing in Plunet as a structured project record is currently filled by a PM. Eldris Voice fills that gap.
Plunet and XTRF integration — routing a structured call record into a new project request in the TMS — is available on Growth tier for standard API connections and on Scale tier for deeper workflow integration. If your agency runs on a different TMS, contact us to confirm availability before committing to a tier.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI receptionist for translation agencies?
An AI receptionist for translation agencies is a domain-trained phone agent that handles inbound calls on behalf of the agency — quote requests, language pair availability questions, turnaround enquiries, project update calls, and out-of-hours international inbound. Eldris Voice trains the agent on the agency's specific service catalogue, pricing, and routing rules before going live, so callers receive accurate, agency-specific responses rather than generic redirects. The agent is not a document translation tool — it is phone reception, handling the inbound call layer that currently consumes PM and translator time.
How much PM time does phone reception typically cost a translation agency?
Based on a conservative estimate of ten inbound enquiry calls per week at eight minutes each, a UK translation agency consuming PM time at a blended rate of £40–80 per hour loses approximately £220–440 per month in unbilled labour to phone handling alone. Agencies handling 15 or more calls per week — typical for operations with active new-business inbound alongside ongoing client relationships — see this figure rise to £430–860 per month. These figures use standard UK professional services rate benchmarks; actual figures depend on call volume, call duration, and the seniority of the staff handling calls.
Does AI replace translators or project managers?
No. An AI receptionist for a translation agency handles the inbound phone reception layer — quote requests, standard enquiries, call routing, and out-of-hours capture. Document translation is a skilled, liability-bearing professional service that requires a qualified human translator. Project management requires professional judgement and client relationship expertise. Eldris Voice replaces neither. It replaces the time PMs currently spend answering routine inbound calls that do not require their expertise, returning that time to billable work.
Does it integrate with Plunet or XTRF?
Integration with Plunet and XTRF is available on Growth tier for standard API connections and on Scale tier for deeper workflow integration. A structured call record from an inbound Eldris Voice call — including caller name, contact details, document scope, language pair, and required delivery timeframe — is routed into a new project request or client record in the TMS, eliminating the manual data-entry step that currently sits between a phone call and a Plunet record. Contact us to confirm integration availability for your specific TMS version before committing to a tier.
Can the agent handle calls from international clients in other languages?
Six languages are handled as standard on every Eldris Voice tier: English, Mandarin Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, and German. The agent detects the caller's language and responds accordingly — a French-speaking client from a Paris-based law firm, a German manufacturing client, or a Mandarin-speaking client from Hong Kong or Singapore calls in their own language and receives a response in that language. For agencies with clients in Arabic-speaking markets or Russian-speaking markets, these languages are available as add-ons on Scale and Enterprise tiers.
Ready to hear it?
Translation agencies are businesses where time is the product. Every hour a project manager spends answering a routine inbound call is an hour not spent managing the project that actually generates revenue.
Call the live demo line — 020 3769 0881 No form. No gatekeeper. Call it and ask it anything.
The demo line runs a live Eldris Voice agent trained on a sample service catalogue. Ask it about a quote for a 3,000-word contract, ask what languages it covers, ask what happens when a client calls after hours. Hear how the inbound layer works. Then compare that to what is happening in your agency right now.
Or book a call with Mark Ritson directly — #contact
See the full pricing — /ai-receptionist-cost-uk
Hear it for yourself
Call the live demo line.
The fastest way to judge an AI receptionist is to ring one. Ask about pricing, ask about languages, ask it to qualify you. Then decide.