Beside (M1) User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience39.4% of reviews
Neutral10.1% of reviews
Negative experience50.5% of reviews

~ Based on 507 written reviews from the US App Store.

What users say

Is Beside (M1) Safe?

Beside (M1): AI Receptionist appears safe based on user ratings. AppsHunter Safety Score for Beside (M1) is 96/100.

This assessment is based on 8,948 user ratings, with an App Store average of 4.8/5.

Safety Analysis

94.2% of ratings point to a safe experience
1.6% of ratings suggest some concerns
4.2% of ratings point to a risky experience

~ Based on 8,948 App Store ratings for Beside (M1).

Is Beside (M1) Legit?

Beside (M1): AI Receptionist appears legitimate, with a few gaps. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Beside (M1) is 78/100.

Based on 78 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Terrible Service

I ported a number over a few weeks ago and still my phone is not ringing. They are claiming to be working on it and I’m losing thousands of dollars in jobs cause of this. Would not recommend this to any small business owner. This app alone is ruining my sales and customer service.

Not happy

Almost every call to my cell does not ring and goes right to ai 99% of the time and if I do ketch a incoming call and answer it pends connecting to ai and never connects. Months of paid subscription from an app that I have I’m now finish out is costing me business. I have checked all of the setting and found nothing wrong. The app worked fine before it was renamed for whatever reason.
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Delay

Everything is delayed. The whole conversation is in delay.

Terrible call quality

Great futures but call quality is awful and support is awful. I am not renewing my subscription. Looking for other options.

Best Ai Receptionist app

Beside has completely changed the way I handle calls for my business. The AI sounds natural, answers questions professionally, books appointments, and follows up with customers without missing a beat. It has helped me capture leads I would have otherwise lost from missed calls and has saved me a ton of time. The setup was straightforward, and the team is constantly improving the platform with new features. We’ve integrated it into our AI systems, and it’s become one of the core tools we recommend to clients because of how reliable it is. If you’re looking for an AI receptionist that actually helps you grow your business instead of just answering the phone, I highly recommend Beside. It’s one of the best AI tools I’ve used.
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Why?

It charges you before you even use the app, why would I pay when I don't even know if I would like it or not?

I love it

This is a great tool for any business

I wish I could give 5 stars

This app is great, except, anytime I answer my phone using Beside, my phone plan from Telus charges me CRAZY amounts of money. Since getting Beside, my phone bill is nearly 4 times the usual amount, it was once nearly 800$. I am hemorrhaging money due to this app. I wish this was not the case!

A good start but room to improve

It’s kind of useful but very you can’t train it from the received calls and the text responses are not editable. If it “schedules” an appointment it’s not easy to review your scheduled appointments. You can’t answer your calls even if it’s set to ring a few times before taking over. I answer it but it never connects. Not once in 20 tries. Not exactly business ready
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Great potential but poor cellular coverage

I really wanted to like Beside/M1 because the AI features have a lot of potential, but I've had a persistent issue with call forwarding that has never been reliably resolved.

When someone calls my business line and I attempt to answer through the Beside/M1 app, the app frequently gets stuck on "Connecting..." and never actually connects the call. At that point, I have no idea whether the caller hung up, the app failed, or I just lost a potential customer.

I've reported this issue multiple times, tried troubleshooting, switched between Wi-Fi and cellular, making sure the app is updated, and the problem continues.

The only reliable workaround is to disable call forwarding entirely and answer calls normally, which defeats the entire purpose of using the app in the first place. I have been using M1/Beside for 2 years now.

For a business that depends on answering customer calls, reliability has to come before AI features. Missing even one legitimate customer because the app hangs on "Connecting..." is unacceptable.

I genuinely hope the team addresses this because the concept is excellent, but in its current state, I can't depend on it for business communications.
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Holy WOW!

This ai receptionist beats all others by far. I have used several and was paying over $200/mo for another service that was just mediocre. The price is right, the customer service is amazing, and the app is outstanding. In particular, the pauses between the live person speaking and the AI response is minimal to none, and I’ve found that I could change the whole conversational style of the AI by simply changing punctuation in my greeting. The text replays have been spot on too! I just started using that feature this week and my clients were unaware that they were exchanging conversation with a non-human. Hands down the best!
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Total waste - read till the end

While the concept is great if it worked and provided service where it is most important… to the CUSTOMER. My experience is the company relies on ai to answer questions and offers a human response email in 24hrs. The experience has been very disappointing and frustrating. You are better off utilizing a simple combination of other reliable providers and maintain control, privacy and add features you want or need when you want. example:
Replace Beside Stack
1. Telephony and phone numbers Telnyx
2. Vapi.ai
3. Telnyx records every call and Deepgram transcribes in real time.
4. Brain/- Claude ai
5. Email and Calendar API’s from Google and or outlook
6. Database and memory - Supabase
7. Dashboard React PWA
Estimated cost $15 to $20 per month far cheaper than Beside and you can have as many users as you like any where in the world rather than Besides restrictions only USA/Canada and their lack of priority customer service.
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I can’t live without her

I have grown accustomed to having an AI assistant to
Make appointments

Works 60% of the time

Contacts never synced, incoming calls would work 80% of the time. Outgoing calls worked about 50%. Horrible experience until I found Allo - the competition

Great app

The receptionist was very helpful. Related all the correct information . Handled all calls properly. Customer service support was nice and productive as well.

Great for small business

Great for small businesses, my patients love the experience. Great on the admin end as well. The office is very responsive to issues that arise and always making improvements.

Functions great-EXCEPT

I absolutely love how it functions and how you can train it to answer all of your questions. My AI receptionist answers questions probably better than if I had one of my younger staff members answering the phone.

Two things that I wish they would update however, are how choppy the conversation can get when the customers talk at the same time as the AI receptionist. The receptionist, then lags which results in the Customer repeating themselves, which is generally when the AI finally speaks again so then it lags again and it just becomes a vicious circle of ‘I’m sorry are you there still?’ or ‘what?! I just wanna talk to a human.’

My second complaint is that because I liked the product so much, I decided to use it for my other business. This is now causing a bit of issue because there’s no way to toggle back-and-forth between the two businesses within the app. I have to have the app on two different phones in order to check the messages and respond. This is super frustrating because the whole point of this was to be able to function off of my personal phone rather than have all three of my phones with me at all times. Would love for them to fix this so I can have one app on my personal phone that I can toggle between the two businesses and call back/respond accordingly. As advanced as this application is, this should be an easy fix. Not sure why it’s not already available.
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Great app small business

I would love to see this app build an extensions feature like grasshopper phone service. In addition, make calls on your behalf as a representative. Those two features will make this app the best ai receptionist on the market. In addition, the devs need to decide on having full A2P 10DLC in addition to other automation functions as their are other AI companies that you can use to get these functionalities working. Tech is moving fast integrations have to come faster and better or customers will find providers somewhere else.


Update: 6/28 - App is getting better but ai advancements are happening everyday as we step further in agentic era, I think your focus should be be more into becoming a connector to Anthropic, or Open AI and developing the integrations it will set you completely apart from your competitors…….
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Supported, encouraged, double charge, ripped off, and enraged.

I spent $300 on this app initially, offered my two cents on having just a one tier fits all option and you guys did it, I get double charged, I don’t know how to remove it, nobody is helping me, the integration suck, can I continue the list other than getting scammed out of $400 and my original $260 or $300 which would’ve had I think up to three members extra I could add to my team and now zero and I’m double charged? How is this happening and why aren’t you doing anything about?
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It’s good but this indentity things is too much

They what you to upload a license and a Delphine for the FCC. 😒 when did the us become so authoritarian