Sep 29, 2026

Quo AI (OpenPhone): What Sona and Quo Agent Can Do

Quo, the business phone app formerly called OpenPhone, now sells a whole stack of AI under one name.

Sona answers calls, a second Sona texts new leads, Quo Agent answers questions about your inbox, and an MCP server puts it all inside Claude and ChatGPT.

The quick answer: Quo AI is good at answering the phone when nobody can, taking a clean message and texting the caller a link. What it doesn’t do, in Quo’s own words: Sona answers only inbound calls, “booking” means texting a scheduling link, it can’t reschedule or cancel on a live call, and it stops answering when your monthly credits run out unless you turn on overages. If you want an AI that calls new leads back, qualifies them against a scored script and books them into your team’s real calendars while they’re on the line, book a call with the Carly team to see Carly Phone.

Quo AI at a glance

From Quo’s help center, product pages and API docs, as of September 2026:

Quo AI feature	What it does	Plan	Cost
Sona (voice)	AI agent that answers inbound calls inside your call flow	All plans	10 calls a month free, then credit tiers from $25/mo
Sona for lead capture (SMS)	Texts brand-new leads, qualifies them, hands off to your team	All plans, beta	Free during beta
Quo Agent	Internal assistant over your conversations, contacts, calls and tasks	All plans, beta, web and desktop	Free during beta
AI call summaries and transcripts	Summary and speaker-separated transcript after recorded calls	Business and Scale (Starter: Sona calls only)	Included
AI call tags	Auto-labels calls against up to 25 tags you define	Scale only	Included
`/AI` reply suggestions	2 to 3 suggested text replies, or a draft from a prompt	All plans	Included
Quo MCP + connectors	Claude, ChatGPT and Grok read and act on your Quo data	All plans	Free, texts sent this way cost $0.01 each

Quo’s seats run $15, $23 and $35 per user per month billed annually (Starter, Business, Scale), or $19, $33 and $47 billed monthly. Plan details are in our Quo pricing guide, and the verdict on the app is in our Quo review.

Sona: how Quo’s AI receptionist answers your calls

Sona is a step you drag into Quo’s call flow builder, so you decide when it picks up:

Overflow: after your team’s phones ring and nobody answers
After hours: behind a business-hours rule
A menu option: “press 3 to talk to our assistant”
Every call: as the first step, so Sona is the front desk

You can run several Sona steps in one flow, each with its own greeting, knowledge and instructions.

Jobs, knowledge and voice

Sona’s behavior comes from two things you write.

Jobs are its playbooks, triggered by what the caller wants: qualify a lead, take a message, escalate. You get up to 10 jobs per Sona step, 10,000 characters each, with templates to start from. Quo is candid about how they run: Sona treats jobs “as guidance, not as scripts,” and “call-to-call variation is expected.”

Knowledge is what Sona knows: typed pages of up to 20,000 characters, file uploads up to 10 MB, or website content. Quo’s guides warn that “Sona can’t visit page links,” so you paste every URL you want it to learn.

The rest of the setup:

Voices and tone: 4 voices and 3 tones (formal, neutral, casual)
Languages: English, Spanish and French, in beta. The help center says Sona can detect which one the caller speaks, but the Sona product page still says it “cannot detect or switch between languages mid-call,” so test before you rely on it. Summaries are always in English.
Memory: with conversation history on, Sona remembers the last 21 days and up to 30 activities between that caller and that inbox

The three things Sona can do on a call

Beyond talking, Sona has exactly three actions:

Send SMS: texts the caller mid-call from your business number, usually a booking link, a form or directions. It can only text the caller’s own number.
Transfer call: sends the caller to a teammate, a shared inbox or an outside number. Quo’s docs are clear that Sona “leaves the conversation immediately” and “cannot return.” If nobody answers, the caller lands in voicemail.
Create Jobber request: if you use Jobber, Sona can create a service request, with a title and job details, before the call ends.

Every Sona call is recorded, transcribed and summarized in the inbox, with a “Handled by Sona” filter and an optional email recap.

Where Sona stops, in Quo’s own words

Inbound only. “Sona currently answers only inbound calls.” It won’t call a new lead back.
Booking is a link. Quo’s appointment-setter page describes Sona sending “SMS messages containing a booking link,” with confirmations sent through Zapier or Make.
No rescheduling or cancelling. “Sona cannot handle rescheduling and cancellations on a live call.” It records the request and texts your booking page.
Quo only. Asked whether Sona works with other phone systems, Quo answers “No.”
Credits run out. Overages are off by default. When credits hit zero, Sona stops answering and calls go to your fallback path, which is voicemail unless you change it.

A caller who hears “I’ll text you a link” still has to open it and book on their own. That handoff is where missed-call leads leak.

Sona credits: what Quo AI costs

Every Quo plan includes 1,000 automation credits a month. One Sona call uses 100 credits, so that’s about 10 calls. Calls under 15 seconds don’t count.

Tier (as of September 2026)	Price per month	Credits	About how many calls	Overage per call
Tier 1	$0	1,000	10	$1.00
Tier 2	$25	4,000	40	$0.75
Tier 3	$49	10,000	100	$0.65
Tier 4	$99	25,000	250	$0.55
Tier 5	$199	60,000	600	$0.45

Tiers are billed on top of your Quo seats, credits don’t roll over, and overage applies only if you switch it on. Older OpenPhone Sona articles quote “$49 a month for 50 calls”: that was the April 2025 launch price, since replaced by these tiers.

Sona for lead capture over text (beta)

The newest Sona texts leads instead of talking to them. It’s free on every plan during the beta and rolling out gradually.

It steps in on new conversations only: a first text from an unknown number, or a missed call from a new number that voice Sona didn’t take. It answers questions, collects details, then posts a summary and tags your team. The limits, per Quo’s help center:

It handles only that first conversation. Later texts go to your team.
Its knowledge isn’t shared with voice Sona, so you train two agents.
No actions are documented, so it collects details rather than booking.

Quo Agent: the assistant for your team (Cmd+J)

Quo Agent faces inward. Open it with Cmd+J and ask about your workspace: “Who called and didn’t get a callback?” or “How many calls did we miss last week?” Every answer links to its source conversation.

It drafts replies and creates or updates tasks and contacts, but “it never sends, saves, or changes anything without your approval.” What it can’t reach:

Your CRM or calendar. Asked about HubSpot or Salesforce, Quo answers “Not yet.” It works only with Quo’s conversations, contacts, calls and tasks.
Sona. It can report what Sona did, but it “can’t trigger Sona actions.”
Your phone. It’s web and desktop only.

Quo’s FAQ adds: “Treat your chat as a starting point, especially for exact counts or older call history.”

AI summaries, call tags and `/AI` replies

Summaries and transcripts arrive seconds after a recorded call on Business and Scale. Starter gets them only for calls Sona handled.
AI call tags (Scale only) apply up to 25 custom tags per inbox, such as “cancellation risk.” Only the AI can apply them.
/AI in a text thread suggests 2 to 3 replies or drafts one from a prompt, on every plan.

Quo in Claude, ChatGPT and Grok: the MCP server and skills

Quo’s MCP server is an official connector in Claude, ChatGPT and Grok, on every Quo plan. Its 16 tools read messages, missed calls and transcripts (Business plan), manage contacts and tasks, and send texts to one person, a group of up to 10 or a list of up to 40. Reads are free; texts sent this way cost $0.01 per segment from prepaid credits. None of the tools places a call.

Quo also publishes seven downloadable “skills” that run over the connector, including a daily report, sales call coaching that scores each call 1 to 10, win-loss analysis and twice-daily voicemail triage. Most need call transcripts, so plan on Business seats.

It’s useful if you already live in Claude or ChatGPT. The limit is that your assistant only sees Quo’s side. Your calendar, email and deals live somewhere else.

What users report about Quo’s AI

Reviews of Sona skew positive on the basics: Trustpilot reviewers like that it asks what the caller needs and collects a name and number, and say it beats a voicemail “black hole.” The complaints cluster into patterns:

Losing the thread. A G2 reviewer who uses Sona to qualify leads says it sometimes asks follow-up questions the caller has already answered. Other reviews say it can misread context or tone, and that its summaries are worth a second look.
Credit burn. Ten calls a month goes fast, and reviewers note credits can run out on busy days. With overages off by default, later calls go to voicemail.
Callers who want a person. Quo’s analytics track “agent abandoned” calls, where the caller hangs up on the AI within 10 seconds, which Quo says “often indicates the caller wanted a human.” Some reviewers say their customers are still hesitant with AI.
Cost that creeps. Credit tiers stack on per-seat pricing, and summaries on every call need the Business seat.

Signs Quo is building more

Two public details suggest what’s next. Quo’s API spec already declares an “Agent Calls” section, “operations related to calls placed by an AI agent,” with no endpoints yet. And the “Not yet” on CRM access for Quo Agent reads like a roadmap item. Neither has shipped, so buy on what exists.

Quo AI vs Carly Phone: where the AI finishes the job

Carly is an AI assistant for businesses, and Carly Phone gives it a business line. Both AIs answer the phone. The difference is what happens next.

What you want the AI to do	Quo AI	Carly Phone
Book the caller into a real calendar	Texts a booking link. Can’t reschedule or cancel on a live call	Books straight into your team’s real calendars while the caller is on the line, with round-robin, and sends the Meet, Teams or Zoom invite
Call new leads back	Inbound only	Calls a new lead within minutes of a form, webhook or new CRM record, then emails and texts, retries, and leaves a voicemail if needed, inside your calling hours
Qualify with a consistent script	Jobs as “guidance, not scripts”	Typed scripts of up to 25 questions, scored the same way every time, with rule-based routing to the right person or team
Hand the conversation to a person	Tasks can be assigned, conversations can’t	Assigns conversations manually or automatically on first reply, with a per-thread switch between Carly replying and a human replying
Know the lead’s history	21 days of calls and texts on that inbox	Recognizes the caller from your CRM and knows whether and when your team last emailed them, because email and CRM are in the same product
Log the lead to a pipeline	Syncs calls to your CRM on Business and up; no deals object	Logs every call to HubSpot, Salesforce or Dynamics 365, turns call answers into contact fields, and has its own CRM with a deals pipeline
Run email and follow-up workflows	No email product; templated auto-replies plus Zapier or Make	Email, calendar and free Zapier-style workflows with ready-made templates, all in one place
Text leads back	Sona SMS handles the first conversation, then hands off	An AI SMS agent that answers and can also book, with STOP and HELP handled automatically

Book a call with the Carly team to see those rows live.

In practice: Claire runs a remodeling company with two estimators, Michael and Emily. A homeowner fills in her quote form at 7pm. With Quo, that lead waits for a person, because Sona only answers inbound calls and new texts. With Carly Phone, the lead gets a call within minutes. Carly asks Claire’s qualifying questions (budget, timeline, zip code), scores the answers, checks Michael’s and Emily’s real calendars, books the estimate with the right one and sends the invite. The answers land on the contact in HubSpot. If the homeowner doesn’t pick up, Carly leaves a voicemail, follows up by email and text, and tries again.

Carly Phone also covers the phone system: ring groups with a press-1 screen so a teammate’s personal voicemail doesn’t swallow the call, phone menus, business hours, voicemail transcription and a shared inbox of calls and texts. Carly connects to thousands of apps.

You don’t write jobs or build call flows yourself. The Carly team sets the line up with you, and it’s priced on a short call. See Carly Phone on a call and hear it qualify and book a lead.

Weighing more options first? Compare Quo alternatives, the best AI receptionists and our guide to AI outbound calling.

FAQ

What is Quo AI?

Quo AI is the set of AI features in Quo, the business phone system formerly called OpenPhone. It includes Sona (an AI voice agent for inbound calls), Sona for lead capture over text, Quo Agent (an internal assistant), AI call summaries, AI call tags, AI reply suggestions and an MCP connector for Claude, ChatGPT and Grok.

Is Sona the same as OpenPhone AI?

Yes. Sona launched in April 2025, when the company was still OpenPhone, and it kept the name after the rebrand to Quo in September 2025. “OpenPhone AI” in older articles usually means Sona or the AI call summaries.

Can Quo’s Sona book appointments?

Sona texts the caller a scheduling link during the call, and confirmations run through Zapier or Make. Quo says it can’t reschedule or cancel appointments on a live call. If you want the AI to book the caller into your team’s calendars directly, book a call with the Carly team.

Can Quo AI make outbound calls?

No. Quo says Sona “currently answers only inbound calls,” and none of the tools in Quo’s MCP server places a call. Carly Phone calls new leads back automatically within minutes of a form, webhook or new CRM record.

How much does Quo’s AI agent cost?

As of September 2026, every Quo plan includes about 10 Sona calls a month. Paid tiers run $25 (about 40 calls), $49 (100), $99 (250) and $199 (600) per month, on top of Quo seats. Quo Agent and Sona SMS lead capture are free while in beta.

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