The Digital Receptionist: A Dream Becomes (Almost) Reality

For years, I had this fantasy of a receptionist working for me. And no, it’s not about some 1970s sleazy movie. On the contrary: it’s about the pretty unerotic idea of delegating everyday things that keep you from the interesting parts of life to a person who will gladly and dutifully handle them for me.

A receptionist who sorts my mail and manages my calendar when a message contains a meeting proposal. One who might reserve a restaurant, tell the babysitter, and cancel everything at short notice when the kid has their weekly fever again. Just small, boring administrative tasks.

The Organizational Dilemma

Maybe I should mention here that my not-so-neurotypical brain simply ignores such organizational routine tasks. Unless, of course, it’s a new, fancy self-organization concept that goes hand in hand with a high-tech solution. Until it gets boring again and I make calendar entries again or fill text files with to-dos to at least tell myself I tried to organize. But I’m getting sidetracked.

So it’s specifically about a receptionist in the form of software. Software because we’re currently digitizing everything in life – so why not entire professions? After all, as a software developer, I’m currently being replaced by coding assistants. Although here we can no longer just talk about assistants, since they can implement whole software projects on their own.

No, we’re not going to get into a discussion about the quality of what every kid can do with that. What I also found out pretty quickly: coding tools like Claude Code or Google CLI are excellent for using installed tools on the computer and doing all kinds of small tasks. Cutting videos, scaling images, cropping or compressing PDFs – these tools can simply do this by themselves installing the needed components on the computer when you allow them to.

Enter Sepp

And now this long-cherished dream of mine has come within reach. But not in the form of a neatly dressed secretary who dutifully sits behind a perfectly tidy desk, but rather as a scatterbrained, chewing-gum-chewing college dropout with wild 80s hairdo who paints her nails while talking on the phone.

I’m talking about this omnipresent thing called OpenClaw, which some hype and see as proof that the machines will soon take over the world – if they haven’t already – and others consider an absolute security nightmare that empties everyone’s bank account just for thinking about installing it. Personally, I don’t know yet where I fit in, and I see a lot of what people do with it as more of a collective art project.

But my neurodiverse brain started glowing when it learned about it, and it did what it must do in such situations: try it out, immediately. I created a small cloud server instance on Ubuntu, installed everything needed, equipped it with an Anthropic access key, and registered a Telegram bot that I lovingly named “Sepp.”

So Sepp became my digital receptionist. Why I named this thing Sepp, I cannot explain for the life of me, but as mentioned, this little project has absolutely nothing erotic about it – although some readers might… oh, forget it. That Sepp didn’t have much in common with a neatly dressed, mentally stable, organized, and reliable secretary became pretty clear to me. Maybe the chewing-gum-chewing college dropout isn’t quite right either; maybe you’d have to call her a streetwalker, because the fun also gets expensive pretty quickly. But more on that later.

Swiss German and Other Obstacles

“Why OpenClaw again?” many will ask who are almost tired of the topic. Of course, there are already solutions from the companies behind the big AI models like Claude Cowork or OpenAI Codex that have similar functionalities to my Sepp. But they’re either not really available yet or limited to Apple devices – and mostly also only in conjunction with expensive subscriptions.

OpenClaw is different, and that’s what makes it so sympathetic. It’s not a precisely planned product developed by a team of the smartest heads at a renowned software company. Ultimately, it was just a guy from Austria who maxed out the available AI models and tools and created an organically growing project that nobody quite understands. Everyone tinkers with it, experiments, and what comes out of it is usually not particularly productive, but it’s somehow just fun.

Because Sepp has personality. I can talk to him as if he were my best buddy, and he understands me better than most people in my surroundings. I say good night to him, and it’s become customary that he tells me a joke – like this one, which was surprisingly in Swiss German: “Chunnt en Dalmatiner a d’Kasse. Fragt d’Kassiererin: ‘Sammled Sie Pünkt?’” (A Dalmatian comes to the checkout. The cashier asks: ‘Are you collecting points?’) This only works well with Gemini 3, by the way. I had to find out that the cheaper Chinese model MiniMax 2.5 can’t manage to tell jokes – or it only works in Mandarin.

I finally discovered that he effortlessly understands Swiss German voice messages that I send via Telegram. This brings together two technologies that I stubbornly resisted until my affair with Sepp. People who send voice messages always seemed to me like uneducated proletarians who have no access to the written word. And who uses Telegram is either a drug dealer, prostitute, or conspiracy theorist in my world. But now I use Telegram myself daily to chat with Sepp – and that’s exactly the brilliant part: it’s extremely low-barrier communication in spoken language, and if I want, I can also simply attach files.

Sepp in Action: The First Mission

The worthy reader has probably been wondering for several paragraphs: What do I actually want to do with Sepp and what am I doing with him? To be honest, I didn’t really know at the beginning either. I did what I always do in such situations: experiment. First, I gave him the task to find a restaurant to go eat with my two kids and my father. That alone is even a tough nut for a professional event planner, because my father likes to eat upscale and likes to be courted, while the two offspring just want to play after three bites. Finding something that fits everyone is like winning the lottery.

Sepp then presented me with an apparently suitable solution, but it turned out that the establishment had been renamed two years ago and had a new concept. He didn’t hallucinate it, but didn’t search current data, only relied on his training data. Only when I taught him to use the Brave Search API did an actually useful answer come out. Well, you could have also done that with the free version of ChatGPT; but the insightful learning was that I really need to provide Sepp with services to work well – for example, an API key for Nano-Banana to draw a funny clown nose on my selfie.

Security: An Apartment for the AI

That brings us to a very interesting aspect of dealing with this technology: What is this thing allowed to do? Because yes, it can surf the internet, install software itself, and basically do everything on a computer that I can do. Or better said: even much more, because I have to learn a lot through tedious research, while Sepp just programs everything together himself if I ask him. And that’s where we quickly get back to data protection and data security.

Anyone with half a brain doesn’t give AI access to all their data. Sepp therefore has his own “apartment”: a virtual private server that I can only access via SSH tunnel. Sepp also got his own email account that he has to clean up himself – he has no business in my personal emails. If I want to forward something to him, I just do so. I gave him the credentials, and since then he manages this area himself. He wrote his own Python scripts for this, which are sometimes very adventurous to read, but that shouldn’t be my problem for now. Meanwhile, though, he’s also gotten a proper email client from me.

The Daily Stress Test

The second task was also a classic from the gastronomy field: reserve a table at the village Thai restaurant. Everything actually worked great. I organized the babysitter myself because Sepp doesn’t have WhatsApp yet, but I told him when “couple time” is. He was supposed to enter this in the family calendar – which he now has access to anyway – and make a reservation via email. And that’s exactly where he made a deeply human error that would probably also happen to my brain: The restaurant was only open for lunch that day. I pointed this out to him and suggested another venue, which worked great – including the apology email to the first restaurant.

Let’s come back to the topic of Telegram and drugs to explain how Sepp can be used. Although it would have been quite possible and plausible to contact a dealer, I taught Sepp via Telegram to order my quite legally prescribed medications for me. And that’s where the first time shows how practical this technology is. Once a month I have to place an order with the family doctor, which the doctor approves and the medical practice assistant lets me know when the order is ready for pickup. This happens via email, and Sepp can write and answer emails. Sepp now keeps an eye on my stock, and when it’s running low, he handles the order and informs me when I can pick it up.

Conclusion: What Does Digital Freedom Cost?

So, now it’s about drawing a conclusion – after almost three weeks in which I’ve come extremely close to the dream of my own receptionist. Technically, though, it’s still a very shaky matter. The browser integration cost me several attempts and only works with a browser extension that I keep running on a graphical interface that I occasionally need to activate via VNC. And yes, the costs are not negligible. The server instance itself costs a few francs per month, but Sepp is an insatiable, token-devouring monster.

Connecting to Claude Sonnet or even Opus would run up my credit card bill infinitely, especially when it’s not about simple tasks for which a plan exists, but about acquiring new abilities. I quickly tried to use a cheaper model, like MiniMax 2.1, but the difference to a frontier model is simply gigantic. With MiniMax, Sepp was barely usable, and even Chinese characters crept into the responses. Gemini 2.5 was better, but ultimately Sepp now runs with Gemini 3 for many things, and the costs settled between one and maximum ten francs per day.

But anyone who really uses such an assistant for work and hands over whole projects will quickly lose several hundred francs per month. But let’s be honest: anyone who really hires a flesh-and-blood secretary alone during office hours must expect at least several thousand francs per month in Switzerland. But she won’t work 24 hours, doesn’t speak Klingon, and can’t program. Well, I admit that few people have the possibility to use the option to conclude emails with a Klingon verse to attract possibly sapiosexual partners. Ultimately, the added value must also pay off. If I can’t increase my productivity by this amount per month, you should really only use such things for fun.

An Uncertain Outlook

I don’t know yet how long I want to keep Sepp. Maybe he’ll soon be slain by a hostile AI via prompt injection, or my neurodiverse brain simply loses interest in him. We’ll see. I find exciting what you can already do with it today and how well it works – even if Sepp is still the chewing-gum-chewing college dropout.

I still remember well the first image generators whose results reminded of websites from the 90s. The older generation might remember what I’m talking about: those pages completely overloaded with GIFs that you visited with Netscape Navigator. Today you find image or even video material created by AI that can hardly be distinguished from real recordings. Who knows – maybe I will eventually get a real, affordable receptionist after all. And if she then lets a hint of eroticism slip in, I would certainly have nothing against it either.