Jun 28, 2026
AI Workflows·12 min
Building an AI Receptionist for a Recording Studio
How we replaced a $2,400/mo answering service with a Twilio + GPT pipeline that books sessions, handles pricing questions, and escalates to a human when it matters.
w9c.dev is the engineering notebook, experiment log, and digital garden behind West 9th Collective. We document what we're building, what we're learning, what breaks, what works, and what we're shipping.
What we write about, sorted.
Lessons from projects, failures, and experiments.
Current software, AI tools, websites, and creative systems.
Honest postmortems. Mistakes. Dead ends. Debugging stories.
Solutions. Optimizations. Performance wins. Automation.
Prompt libraries, experiments, and LLM reasoning workflows.
Automation systems, agent architecture, knowledge management.
Mixing, mastering, creative workflow, studio notes.
CRMs, operations, client management, documentation.
APIs, Python, Zapier, n8n, MCP servers, integrations.
Real problems, real solutions, lessons learned.
Fresh notes from the workshop.
How we replaced a $2,400/mo answering service with a Twilio + GPT pipeline that books sessions, handles pricing questions, and escalates to a human when it matters.
Institutional memory is the cheapest competitive advantage nobody buys. A short argument for writing things down before you think you need to.
Two days, three carriers, one wrong APN. A postmortem on assuming the modem was broken when the SIM was fine.
A repeatable playbook for launching a store in a weekend — theme choices, app stack, and the three settings that actually move revenue.
What worked, what didn't, and the one opening line that outperformed everything else by 4×.
Design system, copy, deploy, and DNS in under six hours. The stack, the constraints, and the parts we deliberately skipped.
Things we're building right now.
The parent studio. Creative technology, AI systems, and client work.
A translation layer between technical teams and the humans who hire them.
1:1 mixing coaching for producers who want to finish records, not tweak forever.
An experimental knowledge OS. Notes, prompts, and workflows in one canvas.
AI-powered receptionist and business operator that answers calls, qualifies leads, books appointments, and escalates conversations when needed.
Voice-first agent that answers, books, and escalates. Deployed at a real studio.
A running record of what shipped, when.
Great systems aren't invented in a single breakthrough. They're assembled through hundreds of small improvements — each one small enough to try on a Tuesday.
Every project teaches something. This website is our public notebook: the messy, honest middle of building things that eventually work.
Eventually every note, prompt, and postmortem.
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