AI Telephone Agents for a Cyprus Business: Greek, English and Arabic

An AI telephone agent answers a business's calls in natural speech: it books appointments, answers common enquiries and transfers a call to a member of staff when the caller needs one. Qualia Solutions builds these agents in Greek, English and Arabic. Since 2 August 2026, European Union law has required that such a system be built to tell callers that they are speaking with an AI system, at the latest when the conversation begins.

What the agent does on a call

The agent answers on the business's existing number. A voice agent built by Qualia Solutions carries out six kinds of work:

• booking and rescheduling appointments, which are entered in the calendar and confirmed by SMS;
• establishing a caller's budget, timeline and location in conversation, and recording them;
• answering questions about opening hours, pricing, locations and availability;
• answering enquiries and taking bookings while the office is closed;
• making outbound calls for confirmations, missed appointments and scheduled follow-up;
• transferring sensitive or complex calls to the team, with the transcript.

Two rules govern the difficult cases. After two unsuccessful attempts to understand a caller, the agent transfers the call to a member of the team. A booking confirmation is issued only once the booking has been made.

Greek, English and Arabic

We work in English, Greek and Arabic, both in consultation and in the voice agents we build. The pacing, pauses and tone of each agent are tuned to the client's brand and tested on recorded conversations, and the client reviews a working prototype before launch.

Greek requires a specific test. The Greek spoken in Cyprus differs in sound from the Greek of Athens: an acoustic study posted in October 2021 compared Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek speakers and found significant differences in the consonants it measured. An agent whose Greek was prepared on the standard language should therefore be heard with Cypriot callers, on the business's own script, before it answers the public.

The Arabic agent we have in development is built for one dialect. Rasha, a telephone receptionist for Numan Halls, a wedding and events venue in Amman, answers booking calls in Jordanian Arabic. She is in development: she answers on a test line and in a browser demonstration, not yet on the venue's own number. Her case study describes the work.

What to check before buying

1. Hear the agent in each language your callers use, on your own script, before full deployment.
2. Listen to the greeting and confirm that it tells the caller they are speaking with an AI system.
3. Ask what the agent does when it does not understand a caller, and after how many attempts it transfers the call.
4. Ask whether a booking is confirmed to the caller before or after it has been entered in your calendar.
5. Ask where recordings and transcripts are held, who may access them and when they are erased.
6. Confirm that the telephone number, the accounts and the data remain yours.
7. Ask for the scope, the deliverables and the cost in writing before development begins.

The duty to tell callers

Article 50(1) of the EU's AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, reads: "Providers shall ensure that AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons are designed and developed in such a way that the natural persons concerned are informed that they are interacting with an AI system, unless this is obvious from the point of view of a natural person who is reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect, taking into account the circumstances and the context of use."

Article 50(5) adds that the information is provided "in a clear and distinguishable manner at the latest at the time of the first interaction or exposure". Both passages are quoted from the European Commission's AI Act Service Desk.

The Commission's page on its transparency guidelines states that Article 50 applies from 2 August 2026 and names national market surveillance authorities among the bodies that enforce it. An amending regulation entered into force on 27 July 2026 and moved the dates for high-risk systems, as the Commission's page on the AI Act records. The Service Desk pages quoted in this section, Article 113 on the dates of application among them, carry a notice that their text has not yet been updated to reflect that amendment. The date given here is therefore the one the Commission states on its transparency page, which was last updated on 6 August 2026.

Article 99 sets the upper limit of a fine for a breach of the transparency obligations at €15 million or 3 per cent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. For a small or medium-sized enterprise the lower of the two applies.

The duty is placed on the provider, which Article 3 defines as the party that develops an AI system, or has one developed, and puts it into service under its own name. A business that buys an agent should still hear the disclosure for itself, because the call is answered in its name. The exception for cases where the matter is obvious is a weak basis for a telephone line on which the agent is built to sound natural. The Commission's questions and answers state that people must be notified "from the start of the first interaction".

Where recordings and transcripts are held

The Commission defines personal data as "any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual" and lists a name and surname among its examples. A transcript that holds a caller's name is therefore personal data. The same page calls the party that determines the purposes and the means of the processing the data controller. On a business's own telephone line, that party is the business.

The Commission's summary of the data protection principles lists what an individual must be told when their data is processed. The list includes the purposes, the length of time for which the data will be stored and whether it will be transferred outside the EU. The page also states that personal data must be stored for the shortest time possible. A decision to record calls therefore requires three further decisions: what the caller is told, how long the recordings are kept and where they are held.

We agree hosting, access and data-handling requirements with each client before development. Clients retain ownership of their code, data and accounts, and data is held within the EU. In Cyprus the authority for data protection is the Office of the Commissioner for Personal Data Protection, in Nicosia.

How a proposal is priced

The cost of an agent depends on four things: the complexity and scope of the calls it handles, the systems it must connect to, the timeline and the support required, and any features built for the business alone. We review a sample of your call recordings and provide a quotation. After an initial consultation of thirty minutes we agree the scope of work and provide a written proposal before any development begins.

Deployment typically takes two to four weeks. A working prototype is available within days, so that the agent can be heard on the business's own script before full deployment.

Our office is at Digeni Akrita 54, 2nd Floor, 1061 Nicosia, and meetings are held in person or by video call. The voice AI page has a voice agent that a visitor can speak with in the browser.

Sources

• European Commission, AI Act Service Desk: Article 50, transparency obligations
• AI Act Service Desk: Article 3, definitions, Article 99, penalties and Article 113, entry into force and application
• European Commission: guidelines on transparency obligations under Article 50
• European Commission: questions and answers on Article 50
• European Commission: the AI Act
• European Commission: data protection explained and principles of the GDPR
• Republic of Cyprus: Office of the Commissioner for Personal Data Protection
• Themistocleous, Fyndanis and Tsapkini: Sonorant spectra and coarticulation distinguish speakers with different dialects

Checked on 2 October 2026.