Ask a small business owner what happens to the calls that come in after closing time and you'll hear some version of the same answer. They go to voicemail. Most of the people who leave a message never follow up, and plenty of them don't leave one at all. They just call the next name on the list.

A new Western New York technology company called Janua Labs has launched with that problem squarely in its sights.

The company builds what it describes as digital employees rather than chatbots. The distinction matters to them. A chatbot answers questions from whatever it happened to be trained on. A digital employee does one defined job on a business's behalf, which in this case means picking up the phone, handling the conversation, writing down what the business needs to know, and getting a real person involved when the situation calls for it.

Starting with law firms

The first product is built for personal injury law firms, and the reasoning is practical. For those firms, almost every new case walks in through the phone. The calls arrive at all hours, often from people who've just had the worst day of their year, and a call that isn't answered usually means that person has already dialed the next firm before anybody notices.

The software answers around the clock, screens what kind of matter is coming in, captures the details a firm needs to open a file, and routes anything urgent to a person on staff.

Only the answers it's been given

The piece the company seems most careful about is what happens when the software doesn't know something.

Every answer it gives comes out of a set of information the business itself has reviewed and approved. When a question falls outside that set, it doesn't improvise and it doesn't guess. It says so and hands the caller to a human being. For a law firm, where a wrong answer isn't just embarrassing but a genuine liability, that's the whole ballgame.

The company has also said plainly that the system doesn't give legal advice.

What's in the name

Janua is the Latin word for door or gateway. It's also the root of Janus, the Roman god of doorways and transitions, who got depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions at once.

It's a fitting picture for a business built around the front desk. A receptionist faces two directions at the same time, outward toward whoever's calling and inward toward the people who need to know about it. The company's tagline leans on the same idea: the door between what is and what comes next.

One industry at a time

The stated plan is to learn one field properly, ship something that actually works in it, and then move on to the next one, rather than building a single general-purpose tool and selling it to everybody. Law firms are first. Other industries are meant to follow.

Whether that approach holds up is the sort of thing that gets answered by customers and not by press releases, and the answering service is still described as being in development. But it's a real Western New York company doing real work in a field that usually happens somewhere else, and that's worth knowing about.

Janua Labs can be found at janualabs.com.