After-hours greeting video with an AI avatar for a small business

Record a 10-second greeting that says you are closed, when you reopen and how to book, and put it on your site or contact page. It replaces a voicemail menu with something a visitor can watch. It is a recorded clip: it cannot take a booking or answer a question, so the last line must point to a form or a phone number.

Visitors who land on your site at night usually want three things: are you open, when, and how do I reach you. A greeting that answers those in one breath beats a form with no explanation.

Sizing the script

Every row is cheap enough to test. Start at 10 seconds.

A 10-second example

The script below is 28 words, which Sume estimates at about 10 seconds, inside the 4-60 second window.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/avatar-1.0/talking-video \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: after-hours-001" \
  -d '{
    "avatar_handle": "front_desk",
    "aspect_ratio": "1:1",
    "quality": "standard",
    "captions": { "enabled": true, "style": "punch", "language": "auto" },
    "script": "Hello, you have reached our studio. We are closed right now and open again tomorrow at nine. Use the booking form below and we will reply first thing."
  }'

Keeping it honest

Say in the page text that the presenter is AI-generated. Do not use a real employee's face without that person's written agreement. Hours change, so keep the opening time out of the clip if it moves weekly, and write it in text beside the video instead. A new script means a new render and a new bill.

Put the clip beside a visible phone number and a booking link. The clip is the friendly part; the contact details are the useful part, and they need to work when the video fails to load.

Keep captions on for this use. Visitors often have sound off, and the inline captions are burned in after generation using the same spoken script.

Where it stops

The clip will not know whether you are closed today. If your hours vary, publish one clip per fixed state, such as closed overnight, and let the page choose which to show. Each variant is its own job at about $1.84 for 10 seconds at standard.

Review the first-frame preview once before the render. If the avatar looks wrong for your brand, change the avatar or scene before you commit to the paid render.