Sandra AI (YC F24) – AI receptionist for car dealers

2 points

2 years ago

Hey Hacker News! We’re Badr, Ismail, and Skandere, co-founders of Sandra AI (https://www.sandra-ai.com/en). Sandra AI is the first multilingual voice AI receptionist built specifically for car dealerships. It handles both inbound and outbound calls, helping dealerships capture every customer opportunity while freeing up their staff to focus on in-person interactions and closing deals.

Here’s a demo video: https://youtu.be/89BbgavAffQ

Phones are still a critical channel for car dealerships, with around 80% of service appointments booked by phone. Yet, 30% of calls typically go unanswered, leading to lost revenue and frustrated customers. Traditional call centers are expensive, hard to scale, and often fail to meet demand. Delays and missed follow-ups frequently drive customers toward competitors.

We designed Sandra AI to tackle these issues. Using multilingual voice AI, Sandra communicates naturally in multiple languages, integrates directly with dealership management systems (DMS), and operates 24/7. It ensures no call is missed and transfers calls to human staff when necessary, following dealership-specific rules. With full visibility into every interaction—recordings, transcripts, and satisfaction metrics—dealers can trust Sandra to improve both customer experience and operational efficiency.

The idea for Sandra AI came from our own experiences in the automotive and BPO industries. We saw firsthand the impact of missed calls on customer satisfaction and revenue. When we noticed how advancements in voice AI could address these challenges, we set out to build a solution tailored specifically to the needs of car dealerships.

Under the hood, Sandra AI is built on top of open-source libraries (like pipecat or vocode) and we use WebSockets with Twilio to manage phone calls. The biggest technical challenge we faced was integrating with the often legacy software of dealerships, which typically lack APIs. This required a significant amount of engineering work to ensure compatibility and smooth data flow between systems. In terms of pricing, we use a subscription model per dealership, with variations based on size and the volume of calls to be handled.

Building AI that feels truly conversational across languages and integrating seamlessly into dealership workflows hasn’t been easy, but we’re excited by the progress so far.

We’d love to hear your feedback! If you run a car dealership or know someone who does, we’d be thrilled to explore how Sandra AI can help. We’re also keen to discuss ideas or challenges around multilingual conversational AI and automating customer service in niche industries.

Thanks, HN—we’re eager to answer your questions and hear your thoughts!