Most Australian small business owners have heard plenty about AI chatbots. Fewer have heard about what’s coming next: AI that picks up the phone.

Curious Thing is a Sydney-based startup building AI voice agents: software that can make and receive phone calls, hold natural conversations, and complete tasks like following up on quotes, screening job applicants, or qualifying inbound sales leads. No hold music. No “press 1 for sales.” Just a conversation.

What Curious Thing Does

Curious Thing’s platform lets businesses deploy AI voice agents that can:

Follow up on inbound leads: when someone fills in a contact form, the AI calls them within minutes to qualify the enquiry, answer basic questions, and book a time with a human.
Screen job applicants: rather than manually phone-screening 50 CVs, the AI calls each candidate, runs through a consistent set of questions, and surfaces the top responses for a human to review.
Conduct post-service surveys: the AI calls customers after a job or appointment to collect feedback and flag dissatisfied customers before they write a Google review.
Handle after-hours inbound calls: instead of going to voicemail, calls outside business hours reach an AI that can take enquiries, book appointments, and answer FAQs.

The conversations are conducted in natural language: the AI listens, responds, and adapts based on what the caller says. It’s not an IVR (interactive voice response) tree. It’s closer to talking to a knowledgeable assistant who happens to be available 24 hours a day.

The Technology

Curious Thing was founded in 2019 by Hong Dai and Cameron Weeks. The platform is built on large language model (LLM) technology: the same underlying technology as ChatGPT: combined with voice synthesis and speech recognition systems tuned for phone call audio quality.

The company has been notable for its focus on outcome-based conversations rather than general-purpose chat. Each Curious Thing deployment is trained on a specific task: lead qualification, candidate screening, feedback collection: with guardrails that keep the conversation on track and escalate to a human when needed.

This focus on specific, measurable business outcomes is what separates purpose-built voice AI from a general assistant with a microphone.

Real-World Results

Curious Thing has published case studies across industries including real estate, healthcare, financial services, and trades. Some reported outcomes:

Lead follow-up response time reduced from hours to under 2 minutes.
Candidate screening time reduced by over 70% for high-volume hiring campaigns.
After-hours enquiry capture rates improved significantly for service businesses that previously relied on voicemail.

The consistent theme: AI voice agents are most valuable when the bottleneck is a human who can’t be everywhere at once.

What This Means for Australian Small Business

AI voice agents are arriving at an interesting moment for Australian small business. Labour costs are high. Customer expectations for fast response times are higher than ever. And most small businesses simply don’t have the staff to follow up every lead within minutes or answer every after-hours enquiry.

The use cases most relevant for Australian small businesses right now:

Tradies: AI follow-up calls after a quote is sent, “Hi, I’m calling from XYZ Plumbing, just following up on the quote we sent on Monday. Did you get a chance to look at it?” Response rates from timely follow-up are significantly higher than email.
Allied health practices: AI recall calls to patients overdue for an appointment: more effective than SMS for certain patient demographics.
Real estate: Instant lead qualification calls when a buyer enquires on a listing: before a competitor’s agent calls them.
Recruitment: Any business doing high-volume casual or seasonal hiring where phone screening is a bottleneck.

🦅 The honest take: AI voice is still early. The technology works well for structured, task-specific conversations and less well for complex or emotionally sensitive ones. For a tradie following up a quote or a physio recalling a patient: it’s a genuinely useful tool. For handling a customer complaint or discussing a medical concern: keep a human on that call. The skill is knowing which is which.

Pricing and Access

Curious Thing’s pricing is conversation-based: you pay per completed AI conversation rather than a flat monthly fee. This makes it accessible for small businesses that want to trial the technology without committing to a large monthly subscription.

The platform integrates with CRMs including HubSpot and Salesforce, and can connect to booking systems and applicant tracking tools via API or Zapier.

The Bigger Picture

Curious Thing is part of a broader wave of “agentic AI”: software that doesn’t just answer questions but takes actions in the world on your behalf. In 2024 and 2025, agentic AI has moved from research labs into commercial products, and voice is one of the most natural interfaces for that agency.

That a Sydney startup is at the forefront of this globally is worth noting. Australia has produced a disproportionate number of companies building practical, outcome-focused AI applications: and Curious Thing is a good example of why.

Curious Thing is headquartered in Sydney. Learn more at curiousthing.io.