Cedri: an AI receptionist, built and shipped by one person

The role

Everything. Product direction, brand, interface design, the marketing site, the backend, the voice pipeline, the database schema, billing, both mobile apps, the store listings, and the release process. Cedri Inc. is a registered Canadian corporation, and Cedri is its first product.

That matters on this site for one reason: it is the difference between a designer who hands over a file and someone who has had to live with every decision in that file at three in the morning before a store review. The services offered here are informed by having shipped a real product end to end, not by having designed one.

What it does

• Answers every call, 24/7

  No hold music, no voicemail, no missed evening or weekend calls.

• Books appointments

  Checks real availability and writes the booking into the calendar during the call.

• English and French

  Detects the caller's language and switches without asking them to choose.

• Knows the business

  Onboarding reads the company's own website and builds the agent, services, and FAQs from it.

• Transcripts and follow-ups

  Every call transcribed, summarised, and scored so nothing falls through.

• Works across 100+ industries

  Templates tuned per industry rather than one generic script.

The hard parts

1. 01

   A receptionist has to sound like a person, not a phone tree

   The hard part of a voice product is not transcription, it is turn-taking: knowing when the caller has finished a thought, handling an interruption, and recovering when someone changes their mind halfway through a sentence. A lot of the work went into conversation rules and tone rather than into features.

2. 02

   Bilingual, without asking the caller to choose

   Cedri answers in English and French. Making the caller press a number to pick a language defeats the point, so language is detected from how the caller speaks and the agent switches silently, keeping a voice that suits the language rather than one accent reading both.

3. 03

   Every business is different, and none of them will configure software

   Small businesses will not sit down and write prompts. So onboarding scans the business's own website, works out what it does, and generates the agent, the services, and the FAQs from that — the owner reviews rather than authors.

4. 04

   Multi-tenant data that cannot leak

   Call transcripts and customer bookings are as sensitive as data gets for a small business. Every table is scoped to an organisation and enforced at the database level with row-level security, not merely filtered in application code.

5. 05

   Two app stores, one person

   Shipping to Apple and Google means two review processes, two signing setups, two sets of store metadata, and platform rules that change. Cedri went live on the App Store on 8 September 2026 and on Google Play shortly after.

How it is built

• Design

  Figma — the web app, the marketing site, and both mobile apps, including the onboarding flow and the light and dark themes.

• Front end

  Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind for web; React Native and Expo for the iOS and Android apps.

• Back end

  Node and TypeScript on Vercel, Postgres with row-level security for multi-tenant data, and webhook handlers for call lifecycle events.

• Voice

  A real-time voice pipeline over a telephony trunk, with per-customer agents, bilingual handling, and function calls into the booking system.

• Payments & email

  Subscription billing with usage metering, and transactional email on a shared template system.

• Shipping

  Continuous deployment for web, and signed release builds submitted to App Store Connect and Google Play Console.