It’s 10 p.m. on a Tuesday when the phone rings at the Sapochnick Law Firm, a specialized law practice in San Diego, California. The caller, a client of the firm, is anxious as the phone rings. They received an important letter containing potentially life-changing news, and had urgent questions for their lawyer.
The client quickly realizes the Sapochnick team likely left the office hours ago, but they stay on the line, hoping for at least a voicemail greeting that can offer some kind of help. Instead of a recording, a voice breaks the silence with a warm, professional greeting. A natural dialog between the two parties begins, and it becomes apparent that the voice from the law firm is capable of far more than answering the phone. It’s well-versed in nuanced immigration procedures, familiar with the firm’s approach to specific legal scenarios, and most importantly, it has the expansive proprietary knowledge of the firm’s founder, Jacob Sapochnick.
This real interaction is possible because of Personal AI Receptionist, a service resulting from the collaborative work between Personal AI and the NVIDIA Riva team. Personal AI is a ready-to-use platform that lets business users create AI workers based on specific personas and trained on an organization’s unique knowledge bases. NVIDIA Riva, a set of speech and translation AI microservices for building conversational AI pipelines, brings these personas to life by enabling natural, real-world conversations. Personal AI, an NVIDIA Inception program member since 2020, also uses NVIDIA Dynamo Triton for optimized inference and NVIDIA Maxine for enhanced video conferencing in its other solutions, to create more immersive AI experiences.
“Our focus has always been on providing exceptional legal services while maintaining personal connections with our clients,” says Jacob, founder of Sapochnick Law Firm. “We have thousands of clients and millions of social media followers, so we get a lot of calls 24/7. Personal AI Receptionist lets us reach more people and support more clients with accurate, up-to-date knowledge of ever-changing immigration laws, allowing our team to focus on what truly matters—navigating cases and securing successful outcomes. It’s been a game-changer.”
Law firms need a boost
From solo practitioners to boutique offices and mega firms, many legal practices struggle with outdated software. But AI solutions like Personal AI Receptionist, which can mold its knowledge and functionality to an individual firm, puts AI at the fingertips of thousands of law practices. Importantly, that functionality is fully managed and controlled by the attorneys themselves. And now, with NVIDIA Riva, that AI is capable of natural voice-to-voice interactions over the phone.
“Mission-critical use cases require technology that adapts to them, not the other way around,” explains Suman Kanuganti, CEO of Personal AI. “We’re excited to shuttle legacy businesses into the twenty-first century and help them serve more clients efficiently.”
How AI personas work
AI personas are digital representations of job functions or people, performing the role of real-world counterparts. Each one is built on a unique Personal Language Model (PLM), and is able to carry long-term memory and the specific context required to perform a particular job. PLMs represent a specialized implementation of small language lodels (SLMs) and are designed to orchestrate a mixture of AI experts through distributed architecture. The PLMs can process personal and proprietary data with superior accuracy and precision, while simultaneously maintaining privacy and security at scale.
Figure1. Personal AI’s persona creation interface showcasing various financial services AI assistant templates.
The AI personas used by Sapochnick Law Firm are aware of distinct practice areas, approaches to handling common cases, answers to nuanced legal questions, and more. “Our personas understand common questions and intake processes specific to immigration law,” Jacob notes. “They help eliminate communication bottlenecks and handle routine inquiries, giving our team more time back.”
Ready-to-use applications of Personal AI Receptionist
Applications for this technology extend across verticals.
Real estate brokerage personas address questions about listed properties, open houses, and application procedures.
Small businesses like cafes, bakeries, and restaurants use personas to discuss menus with customers, review policies, and help make reservations.
Family care practices, dentists, and eye doctors use personas to help patients with billing, insurance, and appointment setting.
These AI personas maintain the professional standards and personal touch that make each business unique while scaling operational capabilities. A specific feature called “Multi-Memory,” commonly understood as relationship memory, allows personas to identify a caller and use past conversations as context. For example, a bakery patron calls to place an order—the persona can reference an order made a month ago for chocolate croissants and make it a point to mention the bakery’s new chocolate almond croissant.
How the technology works
At the core of Personal AI’s speech processing is the automatic speech recognition (ASR) microservice from NVIDIA Riva, which has been excellent for processing phone audio data. Riva’s scalability has been particularly valuable for handling varying loads of concurrent speech processing requests from customers, enabling consistent performance without compromising transcription quality.
Figure 2. Call transcript of a live conversation between a client of Sapochnick Law Firm and the Personal AI Receptionist.
Personal AI uses GPUs in the cloud and the NVIDIA Parakeet Riva NIM for accurate, real-time transcription and low latency, both of which are critical for maintaining the natural flow of conversations. The ability to fine-tune the model at inference enables word-boosting for domain-specific terminology, further improving the accuracy of the model. The transcription feeds directly into proprietary Personal Language Models, which process the text to generate contextually relevant responses. Riva’s performance in handling telephony audio, including compressed audio formats and variable connection quality, makes a wide—and expanding—set of real world use cases possible.
How to get Personal AI Receptionist
Personal AI is working with telecommunications companies to launch Personal AI Receptionist directly through phone plans. Business customers can simply enable their Personal AI Receptionist, upload business-specific memory for training, and select the tasks they want their Receptionist to handle. The rest is taken care of, and the Receptionist can be reached by a simple phone call.
Figure 3. Personal AI’s AI Training Studio where businesses can upload and manage their AI Receptionist’s knowledge base.
To explore these capabilities and the technology behind them, visit Personal AI.
For more information about speech and translation AI from NVIDIA, see NVIDIA Riva.
To learn more about the NVIDIA Inception program for startups, visit the program webpage.