Professional Voicemail Greeting: 25 Scripts, 8 Recorded and Timed

Most voicemail greeting lists give you fifty scripts and no idea how any of them sound. We wrote 25, recorded eight with an AI voice and measured how long each one runs, so you can listen before you copy. We sell an AI receptionist, which is the thing that replaces voicemail; we say where a greeting is the right tool and where it is not.

The four parts of a good greeting

Every script in this article is built from the same four parts, in this order. If a sentence does not do one of these jobs, cut it.

Part 3 is the one most greetings leave out. "As soon as possible" promises nothing; "today", "within the hour" or "by Monday at noon" is something the caller can plan around - and something you have to keep. Part 4 only applies if you have an urgent route; if you don't, leave it out rather than invent one.

How long it should be (we timed it)

We generated the eight greetings below plus one deliberately bad one with two stock voices from ElevenLabs, at 0.9 speed so they would not sound rushed, and measured each audio file.

Three things we did not expect:

• Word count predicts length badly. Two 39-word greetings ran 15.7 and 17.3 seconds. Across all eight good ones the voice averaged about 2.8 words a second, but the per-greeting rate ranged from 135 to 217 words a minute.
• Numbers are slow. The greetings with a phone number, a date or opening hours were the slowest per word. "555-0147" is one word on paper and well over a second out loud. That is a reason to keep it, slowly - a number nobody can catch is useless.
• The classic takes twice as long. At 32 seconds the 100-word version runs about double the 40-word ones and adds nothing a caller needs; it just makes them wait longer for the tone.

Our rule from this: aim for about 15 seconds, stay under 20, and time your own recording with a stopwatch. Your pace is not an AI voice's pace.

8 recorded examples

The businesses are invented. Phone numbers use 555-01xx, a range reserved for fiction, so swap in your own.

1. General business greeting

Why it works: It is the shortest of the eight and still does three of the four jobs. 'What's going on' gets you the reason for the call, so your callback starts with an answer instead of a question.

2. After-hours greeting with an emergency line

Why it works: It names what counts as an emergency. 'For emergencies, call…' invites every caller to decide their leaky tap is one; 'burst pipe or no water' does not.

3. Holiday closure

Why it works: It gives the return day, not just 'closed for the holiday'. Set a reminder to switch it back: a Thanksgiving greeting in December tells callers nobody is minding the phone.

4. Medical office

Why it works: The 911 line comes first, before anything a caller might wait through. Refills are the most common reason to call, so they get their own instructions and their own deadline.

5. Law office

Why it works: 'A sentence about your matter' gets enough to run a conflict check without inviting a ten-minute story, and the last line keeps sensitive details out of a voicemail box several people may hear.

6. Your own direct line at work

Why it works: 'The best time to reach you' saves a round of phone tag, and the claims number routes the most urgent callers away from a person who is not there.

7. Out of office

Why it works: 'I won't be checking messages' is honest, and it is what makes the caller use the backup number instead of waiting a week.

8. Short greeting for a busy front desk

Why it works: It gives the caller a way to finish the job without you. If most calls are bookings, the website is a faster answer than a callback.

And the one not to use

It asks for the date and time, which the voicemail system already records, names the company twice, explains why nobody answered (the caller does not care), and ends on "as soon as possible".

17 more scripts by situation

Not recorded, same four-part structure. Read them aloud and time them.

Lunch break

Weekend

Sales team

Real estate agent

Contractor on a job site

Property management

Restaurant

Therapist or counselling practice

988 is the US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, reachable by call, text or chat (988lifeline.org). "No other details are needed" spares callers from describing why they are calling on a recording.

Dental office, new patients

Several departments

Only use this if your phone system really routes the keys. Three options is plenty on a voicemail; any more and callers forget the first one.

Bilingual, English and Spanish

Keep both halves short; the second-language caller waits through the first. Only promise a callback in Spanish if someone can make it.

IT support or managed services

Accounting firm in tax season

Nonprofit

First week in a new job

Unexpected closure (weather, power)

Callback by text

Only promise a text if you send from a number customers can reply to. If you want this to happen automatically, see our guide to missed-call text back.

What to cut

• "Your call is important to us." Callers have heard it on every hold line; it signals the opposite.
• "We are currently unavailable." They already know - they are listening to a voicemail.
• "…the date and time of your call." The system records both.
• "As soon as possible." Replace with a real time you will keep.
• Your company name twice. Once, at the start.
• Hold music, a slogan or a promotion. Every second before the tone is a second the caller can hang up in.
• Out-of-date details. Last month's holiday, a colleague who has left, last year's hours. Put a quarterly reminder in your calendar to call your own number.

How to set it on iPhone and Google Voice

We only list the two we could check on the vendor's own help pages on October 29, 2026. For a desk phone or a business phone system, look in your provider's help center - menus vary by plan and admin settings.

iPhone

1. Open the Phone app.
2. New (unified) layout: tap the menu, tap Voicemails, tap Edit, then Edit Voicemail Greeting. Classic layout: tap Voicemail, then Greeting.
3. Choose Custom and record your greeting.

Apple notes that voicemail and Visual Voicemail are available from select carriers in select countries (Apple iPhone User Guide). If the Greeting option is missing, the greeting lives with your carrier, and you set it by calling your own voicemail.

Google Voice

1. In the Google Voice app, open the menu, then Settings.
2. Under Voicemail, tap Voicemail greeting, then Record a greeting.
3. Tap Record, speak, tap Stop, then save it with a name.

Google allows up to 10 saved greetings, so you can record your holiday and out-of-office versions once and switch between them. A greeting can be up to 3 minutes in the app but only one minute when recorded in Safari (Google Voice Help). Nobody needs either limit.

Record it yourself or use an AI voice?

How we made ours: the two stock voices "Sarah" and "Eric" from ElevenLabs (we are an ElevenLabs voice partner), their multilingual v2 model, speed 0.9, one take each, no editing. Two things we had to fix in the script rather than in the audio: we wrote "seven a.m." in words, and spelled out the web address, so the voice would read them the way a person would. Listen to every generated greeting before you publish it; a mispronounced street name is the fastest way to sound automated. If the question behind the question is whether callers can tell, we cover where AI voices still slip in do AI voices sound human on the phone.

When a greeting is not enough

You will read everywhere that 80% of callers never leave a voicemail. We tried to find the study and could not. The earliest trade article we found, from 2014, credits "Forbes" without naming a study and quotes another vendor at 50 to 75% (CRM magazine). The best-sourced figure is Moneypenny's: in a 2016 report combining a survey of 300 micro businesses with call data from 10,000 businesses, 69% of callers who reached voicemail hung up (Moneypenny). Moneypenny sells call answering, the survey firm is not named and the data is ten years old, so treat it as a rough order of magnitude, not a fact about your callers.

What it does suggest is that a better greeting fixes how you sound to the callers who stay, not the ones who hang up. If your phone mostly rings with routine questions and bookings, and the people calling are likely to try the next business on the list, a greeting is the wrong tool. That is what an answering service or an AI receptionist is for - we compare the options in AI receptionist vs virtual receptionist vs answering service and put a number on it in the cost of a missed call. Ours answers in a voice like the ones above, books into your calendar and texts you the summary, from 99 euros a month (pricing); you can call the demo first. If your calls are rare and can wait a day, a 15-second greeting from this page is all you need.