Monitoring n8n in my lab

I recently had an issue - while building and testing my AI Voice Receptionist - when my traefik + n8n stack did not respond in a timely manner causing the voice conversation to pause for multiple seconds which, for a voice conversation, is not acceptable.

At the time of writing, I was unable to determine the cause of the slow down. Increasing the memory allocated to the VM that holds my stack made the problem go away, but not understanding how that fixed the problem is something I’m not happy with.

AI Voice Receptionist

Why do we need AI Voice Receptionists?

Recent data indicates that nearly 69% of all business enquiries still originate via phone calls yet analyses suggest that 47% of initial calls to UK SMEs go unanswered.

What is the cost of these unanswered calls?
Mostly it’s lost business (i.e. revenue) and how much depends on the business as each business is different.

Here are a couple examples:

Florist:

Missing approx 10 calls per day.
As typical sales are around £60 per sale, that’s up to £600 per day or £1500+ for a 27-day month.

Read More →

Products

This section described products/services that are available from Observe Automation

While I’ve been building automations, some of them can be packaged and implemented quickly for SMBs (and larger organisations too).

Not everyone needs one of my strategy calls and sometimes a small, specific solution can be just what they need.

All the packages are customised and can be extended.

Please reach out to me if:

• you have any questions, or
• you would like a conversation about Automation and AI, or
• Would like help implementing automation/AI in your business.

AI Voice Receptionist

Creating an AI Voice receptionist for ObserveAutomation

Both as an example of what can be done and as something I can sell to local businesses, I am creating an AI Voice Receptionist that can tell the caller about:

• Who or what is ObserveAutomation
• What services they provide (at a high level and in some detail is needed)
• Opening hours etc.
• Anything else I put into my FAQ
• At the end of the call, add an entry in my CRM

It should also be able to put the call through to my mobile if the caller asks for that.

Last but not least, I should sound like me - as in the way I talk rather than the actual sound of my voice.

Voice Receptionist

Can’t get away from something when a call comes through? Are your risking losing customers?

Maybe all the caller wanted was your opening hours or maybe just to book an appointment.

Invoice/Receipt Processing

I hate book-keeping

To me, one of the most tedious aspects of running is a business is entering invoices/receipts/expenses into the accounting system and staying accurate.

It’s a slow, time-consuming manual process that is error-prone. Automation and AI (for intent and data extraction) can save around 10 minutes per invoice and improve your accuracy.

Availability Finder

Finding slots for a meeting can, depending on the week, be challenging.

This workflow pulls calendar entries from Google Calendar and determines what slots are available.

Scanning pallets of books!

A local entrepreneur friend of mine buys books by the pallet and then resells them - sounds easy, right?

A frustration he has is the time it takes to gather the information about each book (ISBN, author, synopsis etc.). He needs to get this into his inventory system.

This problem is ripe for an automation which will bring his data entry down to minutes rather than hours per pallet.

Job Search Optimisation automation using n8n

Using my n8n automation skills and my knowledge of GenAI, I built some automations to save time and focus my job search. The first automation saves me around 2 to 3 hours of reading job roles every day.

Searching for roles can be very time-consuming especially when the job title you’re searching for is a common one which applies to a wide variety of domains as is the case for my job title.

Auto-labelling emails using AI and n8n

I spend too long every day labelling (or categorising, if you prefer) the many emails I receive. There has to be a better way!

An automation could automatically read my emails and decide how to label them for me… and more

Portfolio

This section holds a portfolio of my work.

For the past few months I’ve been building some automations - some of the use AI but many don’t - and I’m just super passionate about automation.

I have started a business called ObserveAutomation to provide automation/AI strategy and services to customers in the UK, helping people out with my automation/AI skills and systems.

I share here some of the work I’ve been doing with a focus on showing how it delivers value. There are few slightly technical bits to show how the result were achieved.