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3CX - New AI Features and Extension Fair Usage

October 22, 2025 - 3CX are excited to announce some of the new upcoming AI features - ready in Update 8 Alpha coming out in the next couple of days - along with a recap of our extension fair use policy.

Onboard Transcription Without an External Service

Transcribe calls on your network without OpenAI or Google - you’ll save significantly, but most importantly you’ll not need to share your call data with an external service. All transcription is done on a machine you fully control, either on your network or in the cloud. The service can run on a desktop computer, even if your PBX is located in the cloud. You can use low cost, yet powerful, desktop AI computers such as the Asus Ascent GX10 or add GPU 5090 boards to a server. Alternatively you can get a GPU instance from Google or Amazon.

Speaker Diarization

This feature also has another big advantage over an external service. It's able to analyze the voice in stereo allowing for 100% guaranteed speaker diarization. 3CX will reliably and accurately identify who said what, something that Google or OpenAI do not do accurately because they guess it based on AI. If you’re going to evaluate people based on what they say, you’re going to want to have it 100% correct! With transcription, all calls will be summarized with action points sent by email; they will also be available from the recents page.

Virtual AI Receptionist - Multi Lingual, Handles 10+ Calls

The AI Receptionist feature allows you to answer and screen calls, detect if it’s a spam call and route calls to the right queue or person, checking their availability all without requiring human intervention! Not only is the AI receptionist a polyglot, speaking multiple languages, it can switch according to the language of individual callers.

Call Transcription Bundles Via 3CX Online Service

Call transcription bundles via 3CX online service will also be available from Update 8. This is recommended for smaller installs that don’t want to buy machines with GPU processors. Costs are not 100% set, but we can say with certainty that 3CX transcription will be at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI transcription. Unlike many other competitors, who charge substantial extra fees for AI features, the above features will be integrated into the 3CX editions. Validating once again the competitiveness of 3CX, given the prices we charge.

Extension Fair Usage Policy

Extension/User benchmark ranges have been published on our website for quite some time. However, we can appreciate it hasn’t been understood by everyone in the way we’d perceived it would be. This blog addresses this by articulating our expectations more clearly as well as a proposed timeline for change. 3CX's unique and generous user licensing model, inherently less expensive for most medium to large installs, has allowed you to have a range of users rather than having to pay per-user, per-month. And whilst most of our license holders have aligned with the fair use of our user licensing model range - SIM Calls versus number of extensions - there’s a small percentage of around 15% of licenses who’ve gone beyond these limits. To address this, rather than making 3CX significantly more expensive for everybody, we’ll only target those 15% of 3CX users who fall outside of the extension fair use policy. These users will have to buy the appropriate SIM Call license. If you refuse to meet the criteria, and have pre-paid multi-year licenses, refunds for pre-paid years will be considered for medium to large licenses. Extension limits will not be enforced any time before 1st April 2026 as a minimum. This gives those going beyond the fair usage limits more than enough time to consider their options - either an upgrade or a different IP phone system solution.

Maximum Number of Extensions

The table below shows the maximum number of extensions per SIM Call license. System extensions are not included in the total. In practice, as you can see in the highlighted example below, we’ve remained generous in our calculations: 26 to 50 users can enjoy a maximum of 80 extensions on a 16 SC licence. A comparable solution for the same maximum number of extensions, on the other hand, will cost you more than 10 times that amount when you take their monthly per user cost of $10, and multiply it by our maximum number of user/exts. Keep in mind this doesn’t include all of the features you get with a 3CX license!

Pricing Changes

To reflect the above AI feature additions, there will be pricing adjustments effective 1st November 2025.

Committed to Innovation & Value

3CX remains steadfast in its strategic focus on being the leader in the medium to large enterprise phone systems market. Our new AI features prove once again our ability to innovate and stay ahead of the pack. Notwithstanding our technical capabilities, and with the above extensions limits, we remain the most competitively priced product in its class. We trust you’re excited as we are about the next chapter for 3CX.

3CX solutions are available in UK through Simple IT Distribution LTD, 3CX Partner in the UK.

About Simple IT Distribution LTD

Simple IT Distribution LTD is backed by 10 years of experience in Value Added IT Distribution. What sets us apart from the crowd is our customer-centric approach, the quality services (consulting, implementation, training, support), and the people behind them, which are experienced and certified proffessionals. We provide sales and technical advice and deliver the solutions that best meed our customers' diverse technology needs. Our partners are hand-picked from the top vendors, and we back up their solutions with certified professionals, to give you nothing but the best.

For more information, please visit www.simpleit-distribution.co.uk .