My sister will do almost anything to avoid making a phone call — she'll email, text, or wait in an app's chat queue for twenty minutes before she'll actually dial a number, even for something simple.
She started using an AI chatbot to prep for the calls she genuinely can't avoid, like a doctor's office or a customer service line that only takes calls — working out exactly what she needs to say upfront so she isn't fumbling for words once someone actually picks up, which is usually what makes the call feel so much worse than it needs to be.
For anything that can reasonably be handled another way, she uses it to draft the email or the chat message instead, which cuts down how often she has to make the call at all.
Having a script prepared ahead of time hasn't made her love phone calls, but it's taken away the part that used to spiral into avoidance — not knowing what to say and rehearsing the whole thing in her head for days before finally picking up the phone.
Phone anxiety is common enough that it's worth building a system around instead of just pushing through it unprepared every time. A little prep beforehand turns a dreaded call into just another task to get through.
If you want the slow, no-jargon version of all this — the stuff I wish someone had handed me before I fumbled through it myself — that's exactly what I built On Ramp AI for. Check it out here.