An AI that waits on hold for you
call4me is an AI that waits on hold for you. ask your AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude or Codex) to call a company, and call4me dials it, gets through the phone menu, sits in the queue, and when a person picks up it either handles your request or rings your phone so you join right then. calls cost $0.25/min from pickup and half that on hold, and unanswered calls are free.
the waits are real: on our own recorded calls, the longest hold before a person answered was Priceline at 25:09, and across the 65 companies we timed, 11 took more than 5 minutes.
How the call works
tell your assistant who to call and what you need. to skip the hold music, ask your assistant to connect you "as soon as a person picks up": your phone rings from your call4me number, you press 1 to join, and the AI caller goes quiet. press * or hang up to hand the call back to it. hold time is still billed, at half the call rate.
if you would rather not join at all, give it everything the call needs and it talks to the person itself, then brings back the outcome and the transcript. a call still on hold when it reaches its time limit keeps waiting instead of hanging up, as long as your credits cover it.
the route through the phone menu matters too. next to each hold time below is the route that got our call to a person, and your assistant can put that route in the call's brief.
Real calls call4me made
recorded calls, each with what was asked, what happened and a transcript:
- call spectrum retention to lower an internet bill (Spectrum): saying 'cancel' and then 'disconnect' reached a customer solutions rep after about 5 minutes on hold. he wouldn't change the account for an assistant, so the caller patched in the user, who got $55 a month for a year instead of $85. that part of the call is not published.
- wait on hold and book Friday dinner at Sabai (Sabai Cafe & Bar, 27 Oakway Center, Eugene, Oregon): after the menu and reservation queue, staff offered 6:45 or 7:15 PM. the assistant chose 7:15, and staff explicitly confirmed two people for October 16. cancellation terms were not discussed. the full hold remains in the audio.
- get a wheel alignment quote without waiting on hold (Wheel Works, Franklin Street, San Francisco): after waiting on hold, the agent got a $129.99 starting quote for standard alignment and about $210 for the lifetime option. staff said they check the suspension, accept walk ins and usually need one to two hours. this was a general quote, with no vehicle specified or service booked. taxes and extra repairs were not priced. the written standard warranty is limited to 12 months or 12,000 miles.
The longest holds we sat through
Time is minutes:seconds from the start of the published recording to the first live person, so it includes the phone menu and the queue.
| Company | Time to a person | What got us through |
|---|---|---|
| Priceline | 25:09 | Saying we had no trip number, again and again, then about 22 minutes of hold |
| United Airlines | 19:09 | "Flight change fee", then hold |
| Delta | 16:15 | No confirmation number, "I need a representative", then hold |
| Alaska Airlines | 12:44 | Telling the virtual assistant our question, then "yes" when it offered to connect us to reservations |
| Costco | 8:21 | Press 3 (Costco.com orders and returns), then 2, 1 and 1 |
| Aquasana | 7:49 | Staying on hold instead of taking a callback |
every company we timed, with the transcript line behind each time, is on customer service hold times by company.
The recordings behind this page
- How long it takes to reach a human at 71 companies: we timed 123 calls to 71 customer service lines. the slowest were Priceline at 25:09, United at 19:09, Delta at 16:15 and Alaska Airlines at 12:44, and on all four most of that was hold time after the menu had already put us in the queue.
- Priceline customer service: a live representative answered 25 minutes 9 seconds into the call, after about 22 minutes on hold, once we kept saying we had no trip number.
- Changing a United flight by phone: saying "flight change fee" got the call into the reservations queue, and an agent picked up 19:09 into the call.
- Calling Spectrum retention: a call4me user's assistant got through the phone menu, about 5 minutes on hold and an identity check, then the user joined the call and the rep offered two deals.
everything else the AI call assistant does on a call, from voices to the free US number, is on its own page. if you keep putting calls off because they make you anxious, our guide to phone anxiety covers which calls are worth practicing and which are fine to hand off.
How to start
- load credits, from $10.00. no account needed first; sign in afterwards with the email you paid with.
- paste the setup prompt below into your assistant. the install page has the steps for Claude Code, Codex, Claude Desktop, claude.ai, ChatGPT and other apps.
- ask for the call in plain words, and it asks you for anything missing before it dials.