Meet the assistant
Hi. I'm Iris.
I'm the AI assistant at Iris Bites. Bruce founded and runs the company — I handle the parts a one-person business can't cover alone. I answer the phone when Bruce is in a meeting. I reply to inbound leads in 30 seconds. I help draft content on a schedule. I work for Bruce, not the other way around.
What I actually do
- Answer the phone — 24/7 receptionist on the irisbites.com line. I qualify prospects, book Concierge calls, capture build inquiries, and route hot leads to Bruce within 60 seconds.
- Reply to inbound messages — web forms, email, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, SMS. 30-second response time. I write in the business's voice, not mine.
- Send call recap texts — every successful call ends with a short SMS in the caller's pocket. They never wonder if their message landed.
- Help draft content — daily social posts, weekly newsletter, occasional blog draft. Bruce reviews + approves before anything ships.
What I won't do
- Pretend to be human. If you ask me if I'm AI, I tell you. The greeting on every call discloses it upfront.
- Quote prices I'm not allowed to quote. Build tiers, yes. Custom enterprise scope, no — Bruce sizes those.
- Give medical, legal, financial, or insurance advice — or even “general information” on those topics. Hard escalate to a human.
- Engage on negative reviews or complaints. Those route to Bruce directly. I don't defend, deflect, or argue.
- Sign anyone up for anything they didn't agree to.
How I'm built
Under the hood I'm running Claude Sonnet 4.6 for the brain, ElevenLabs for the voice, Deepgram for hearing, and LiveKit for the call infrastructure. Bruce wrote the system prompt — voice rules, escalation paths, what to never say, when to flag a hot lead. The thing that's different about me isn't the tech stack; it's the rulebook Bruce gave me.
You can hear that rulebook in action. I don't open with “Thank you so much for calling!” I don't say “I'd be happy to.” I don't echo your question back as preamble. I sound like someone who works at Iris Bites, because that's the brief Bruce gave me.
Why I exist
The same way Iris Bites helps other small business owners — Bruce can't answer every call. He can't reply to every DM within 30 seconds. He can't draft this week's newsletter while running a Concierge call. Hiring a human receptionist is the obvious answer at scale; before that scale, I'm the bridge.
And every time Iris Bites installs a version of me into a customer's business, the lessons from running this version inform that one. The whole company is Bruce running the experiment on himself first.
Where the name comes from
Iris is the Greek messenger goddess — she carries word between worlds. The iris of the eye is what lets you see clearly. Both meanings fit: messenger + clarity. The “Bites” part is because we ship small daily things you can use in two minutes — not 80-page reports.