Why we built Alfred

Short version: travel is easy until you need to make a phone call in a language you don’t speak.

Signs and menus are mostly solved. Point your camera and read. A phone call is different. It’s live, it’s fast, and there’s nothing to point a camera at. So the call to the small restaurant, the massage place or the garage often just doesn’t happen, and you end up somewhere else.

Live translation on phones keeps getting better, and we’ve written about where it works. It still means making the call yourself, in the languages your phone supports. We wanted something you could hand the whole call to.

What it does

You type what you need in your own words. Alfred calls the place in its language, has the conversation, and tells you what happened: booked or not, the details, and anything they asked.

The rules we set ourselves

• It says it’s an AI assistant. It doesn’t pretend to be a person.
• Nothing is dialled until you tap Call now.
• No answer, a busy line or voicemail costs nothing.
• A call can run for up to 10 minutes, and no longer.
• If it couldn’t get through, it says so. It never reports a booking that didn’t happen.
• Transcripts are kept until you delete them.

Where it is now

Alfred is in a private beta on iPhone, through TestFlight, and it calls in 19 languages. Your first call is free for up to two minutes. After that, calls cost 25 credits a minute to a landline and 50 to a mobile. There’s no Android version, and we’re not promising one yet.

It’s made by Webmates. If you’d like to try it, join the waitlist and we’ll be in touch when a spot opens.