An AI receptionist for Canada: French or English, a local number, and the privacy rules to know

French callers, served in French

The agent answers in French or English and follows the caller: someone who opens with « Bonjour » gets French, someone who opens with "Hi" gets English, and a caller who changes language halfway is followed. There is no "press 9 for French" menu and no second number to publish. You write the greeting, so it can open in both languages, the way many Canadian businesses already answer the phone.

In Quebec, the Charter of the French language gives consumers the right to be informed and served in French. Answering the phone in French can be part of how you respect that right, but the Charter reaches much further than calls — signs, contracts, websites — and the Office québécois de la langue française is the authority on what it requires of your business.

Before you go live, call the agent yourself in French and listen to the voice, the wording and how it handles names and addresses. Everything it says — the greeting, the answers, the closing — is yours to edit.

A local Canadian number on the +1 plan

Canada and the US share the +1 country code, and the self-serve service issues numbers in both. When your launch opens you choose Canada and search by area code — 416 or 647 for Toronto, 514 or 438 for Montréal, 613 for Ottawa, 403 for Calgary, 604 for Vancouver — and pick a local number from what the carrier has available in that code at that moment. Numbers are local, not toll-free.

Already have a number your customers know? Keep it, and ask your phone provider to forward calls to the agent's number — all of them, or only the ones you don't answer, so your own phone still rings first. Forwarding is set up with your provider, not with us, and the codes and fees differ from one provider to the next.

PIPEDA, and Quebec's Law 25

A recorded call holds a caller's name, phone number and whatever they tell you, which makes it personal information. The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) is Canada's federal privacy law for businesses: it governs how they collect, use and disclose personal information in commercial activities. Its principles are the ones you would expect — say why you collect information and get consent for it, collect no more than you need, protect it, keep it no longer than necessary, and let people see what you hold about them. Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia have their own private-sector privacy laws, recognized as substantially similar, that apply instead within the province.

In Quebec, Law 25 rewrote the private-sector privacy act in stages between 2022 and 2024. Among its obligations: a business has a person in charge of protecting personal information (by default its highest-ranking person, who can delegate the role in writing) and publishes that person's title and contact details; it assesses the privacy impact before personal information is communicated outside Quebec; and it reports confidentiality incidents that present a risk of serious injury to the Commission d'accès à l'information and to the people affected.

What the product gives you to work with: identifying details are masked in transcripts, access to recordings is limited by role, and an erasure request runs through a recorded workflow with a reference number. In the self-serve cloud service some model services are external providers, as our security page explains. If Law 25 or a sector rule means you need to know more about where call data goes before you switch the line on, ask us first.

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Telling callers the call is recorded

Every call is recorded so you can review it. The federal privacy commissioner's guidance on recording customer calls comes down to three things: tell callers at the start that the call is recorded, tell them why, and get their consent. It also reminds businesses that a caller can later ask for access to the recording.

You write the greeting, so the notice can be the first thing a caller hears, in both languages — for example: "Bonjour, hello. This call is recorded so we can follow up on your request." Clinics, and anyone else handling health information, may also have a provincial health-privacy law to follow.