Payphone
Payphone brings AI and Blockchain into phone calls, making every call smarter, more efficient, and ultimately, more valuable.
The Challenge for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs):
1. Limited Time & Resources
SMBs face a perpetual challenge: they want to grow, but hiring more staff to answer phones and manage schedules becomes increasingly expensive and cumbersome.
2. Customers Prefer Phone Calls
While online booking systems exist, many customers still find picking up the phone simpler and more immediate. However, juggling phone calls, calendar updates, and customer requests manually is prone to human error and scheduling conflicts.
3. Low Customer Commitment
No-shows and last-minute cancellations can be disastrous for businesses with tight schedules. A canceled slot means lost revenue and the missed opportunity to serve a different customer.
Payphone's 3 Key Solutions:
1. Unlimited AI Scalability
- Cost-Effective Growth: AI agents handle as many concurrent calls as needed without the overhead of hiring more staff.
- 24/7 Availability: Customers can book appointments any time, even after closing hours, boosting convenience for both business and client.
- Shared Calendar Access: All Payphone agents work off the same real-time calendar, reducing double-bookings and other scheduling mishaps.
2. AI-Powered Voice Automation
- Natural Language Processing: Payphone’s voice AI interacts like a human operator, freeing up staff to focus on in-person services.
- Multi-Agent Architecture:
- A specialized Calendar Agent handles all scheduling tasks.
- A Wallet Agent manages payments.
- This ensures expertise in every part of the booking flow without overwhelming a single system.
- No Learning Curve for Customers: People call exactly as they normally would—no apps, no new software, and minimal friction.
3. Blockchain-Based Payments
- Immediate Transactions: Payphone uses Coinbase CDP Commerce to accept on-chain payments within the call itself, ensuring bookings are secured only upon payment.
- Reduced No-Shows: Prepayment confirms commitment. Customers are far less likely to skip an appointment if they’ve already paid.
- Programmable Money: Automated refunds, waitlists, and loyalty programs can be built right into the smart contract, adding flexibility and transparency for both businesses and customers.
Try Our Demo: Ojisan Barber Salon
For demonstration purposes, Payphone is set up to manage calls for a fictional shop, Ojisan Barber Salon. To keep things straightforward, we’ve made a few assumptions and simplified details:
- Operating Hours: Limited to certain times each day; Payphone politely declines calls for appointments outside these hours.
- Single Stylist: The salon cannot handle more than one reservation at the same time.
- Fixed Appointment Length: All services last exactly one hour.
- On-Chain Wallet Setup:
- You’ll need to register your phone number, receive a dedicated wallet address, and fund it with at least 0.001 ETH on Base.
- During the call, the AI can trigger payment instructions via Coinbase Commerce.
- Creation, Modification, Cancellation:
- You can verbally request new appointments, change existing ones, or cancel and request refunds—Payphone updates everything on the shared calendar in real time.
Get Started:
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Phone or Web Call:
- Dial the US-based phone number or use the web call interface.
- The AI answers, verifies your reservation needs, and processes your payment on the spot.
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See Payphone Work in Action:
- Look at the Calendar tab, which is updated in real time by the AI agent, complete with blockchain information.
Payphone bridges the gap between traditional phone calls and cutting-edge technology. By introducing AI and blockchain into everyday business operations, it transforms a simple phone call into a powerful, automated, and secure reservation system.
We built Payphone using:
- Retell (https://www.retellai.com/) for our voice AI agent. It has the ability to converse in phone call, tool calling to our API.
- Nodegen (https://nodegen.fun/) is our home-brewed AI framework that features a no-code Visual Programming way to build AI agents, and one-click deploy complete with API access.
- Supabase for our database and storage.
- Cloudflare Workers for our business logic API that interacts with Database.
- A simple Calendar System that is powered by our Calendar Agent, the agent is able to write SQL command to check availability and collision.
- Payment is processed using Coinbase CDP Commerce.
- Transaction are made in Base Mainnet.
- Wallet Agent are made using CDP Agent Kit
Payphone is a multi-agent system:
User talks to Retell, which Retell can talk to our Calendar Agent and Wallet Agent.
Coinbase CDP Commerce simplify on-chain payment processing powered by AI agents, all on-chain payments are completed with a receipt that is even emailed to the business owner.
Base being the home of consumer dapps is a great fit for Payphone, where transaction are fast and cheap.