How SpareLabs Put AI Voice on the Front Line of Public Transit And Watched It Take Off

Josh Andrews

COO

COMPANY SIZE

100-500

INDUSTRY

Transforming customer service

LOCATION

North America

USE CASE

FEATURES

Results

10x+

YoY growth in Spare's AI product line

~30%

of calls automated in the first week of deployment

100%

call resolution at top-performing customers

Want to be the next Retell success story?

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About SpareLabs

SpareLabs is the operating system for modern transit. Cities and transit agencies — including BART and municipalities across North America and Japan — use Spare to run more efficient, more accessible public transit.

Spare serves two audiences: the agencies that buy the platform, and the riders those agencies serve. The second group is where this story starts.

🎯 The challenge

The riders who needed service most were waiting the longest. 

Many of Spare’s customers run paratransit for people with disabilities. For those riders, a phone call is often the only way to book a trip, check an ETA, or get an update. 

But the experience was broken. Outsourced call centers. Thin staffing. Long holds. Every minute on hold was a minute a rider couldn’t plan their day. 

Spare knew voice AI could fix it. They just couldn’t get it to work. 

“Back in 2023, we were very excited by the latest in AI voice models. But we struggled to get them to work as well as we wanted them to.”

🏆 The solution

In early 2024, Spare took another look at voice AI. After evaluating several vendors, they chose Retell — for two reasons: speed, and substance. 

“Retell had better latencies, it was a better product we could interact with, and it was faster to set up. The built-in support and the ability to stay up to date with the latest models has been really helpful.” 

By March 2024, Spare was live with Retell in early-access deployments.

👀 How they did it

1. Build once, deploy in a click

Spare’s transit customers all face similar problems. So Spare built a single, configurable Retell agent that already understands transit flows, ride-booking logic, and the tool calls into Spare’s platform. Turning it on for a new agency is now a one-click action. 

“The configuration process is quite simple for us now. We don’t have to spend weeks to build it. You can basically turn it on in a click.”