G2

Christoph M.

Präsident

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/11/2026

"More than an AI Answering Machine – Great Potential, but Room for Improvement"

4.5/5

What do you like best about fonio?

What I particularly like about fonio is how flexible and customizable the AI phone assistance can be. We use fonio in a volunteer-organized state association with over 300 member clubs. Here, it is a huge relief when callers not only get transferred but also receive competent answers to their questions over the phone.

The combination of our own knowledge database, individual conversation instructions, personalized greetings, forwarding, and automated emails opens up many possibilities for us to build a truly helpful digital office.

I especially appreciate that we can give our assistant K-I-Rina her own personality: friendly, knowledgeable, sometimes a bit cheeky, and fittingly for our carnival association, also a bit whimsical. This turns a technical solution into a sympathetic part of our association's communication.

Of course, setting it up requires a lot of fine-tuning and testing. But the diverse customization options make fonio interesting for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about fonio?

What I currently dislike are mainly the limitations with more complex tasks and the pricing model for additional features and communication channels.

We don't just want to use fonio as an intelligent answering machine, but to build a digital office for our volunteer-organized state association. For this, we have set up an extensive knowledge database and configured our AI assistant individually. Nevertheless, we experience that existing information is sometimes not reliably found, answers remain superficial, or the AI promises functions that are not technically set up.

Setting up forwarding, email actions, and individual conditions also requires a lot of trial and error. A more transparent representation of which knowledge sources were actually used and why certain actions are triggered would be helpful.

However, I am particularly critical of the pricing structure. We invest a lot of time and work in building an AI that knows our association, its structures, regulations, and offerings. This knowledge is already available. Whether the AI provides it over the phone, in a chatbot on our homepage, or via WhatsApp, initially makes no fundamental difference from my point of view. Nevertheless, additional communication channels must each be paid for separately.

If we wanted to use our K-I-Rina both by phone and on our website and via WhatsApp, our costs would quickly multiply under the current model. This is particularly difficult to convey for non-profit organizations and volunteer-run associations.

Therefore, I would wish for a cross-channel model: a central AI with a shared knowledge database that is accessible through various communication channels without each additional channel being practically calculated as a standalone product. Different usage volumes and actual additional costs can, of course, be reflected in the price. But merely providing the same knowledge over another channel should not lead to a disproportionate increase in costs.

I also see development potential in web research and the actual sending of documents from the knowledge database.

I fundamentally consider fonio to be a promising product. All the more, I wish that technical reliability, functionality, and pricing will better align in the future – especially for organizations that want to reach as many people as possible with limited financial resources. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is fonio solving and how is that benefiting you?

As a predominantly volunteer-organized state association with over 330 member clubs and around 30,000 active members, we face a particular challenge: Our office and our volunteer officials must be accessible to many people, but cannot always answer the phone. At the same time, numerous questions about association law, statutes, non-profit status, events, funding opportunities, and responsibilities are repeated.

This is exactly where fonio helps us. With our AI assistant K-I-Rina, we create a central telephone contact point that is available around the clock, receives inquiries, and ideally answers many questions independently based on our knowledge database.

The greatest advantage for us is not that an AI answers calls, but that it makes existing association knowledge immediately accessible. Our member clubs do not have to first find out who is responsible for a particular topic, and our volunteer officials are relieved of recurring standard questions. Concerns that require personal processing can be specifically forwarded or recorded for a callback.

It is particularly valuable that no inquiries have to be lost simply because no one is available at the moment. Through conversation summaries, automatic emails, and individual forwarding rules, we can capture concerns more structurally and then process them more specifically.

For us, fonio is therefore also an important building block in the modernization and professionalization of our association work. We want to create an office that functions independently of the constant personal availability of individual volunteers and at the same time offers good service to our member clubs.

We are still in the setup and optimization phase. Not everything works as reliably as we would like. But the potential is clearly recognizable: fewer interruptions, better accessibility, faster information, and more time for tasks that actually require people.

Our goal is not to replace personal contacts with AI, but to relieve them and make them more accessible to our member clubs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.