Voice agents

A voice agent talks to people out loud, over the phone or in your app. It is a bot with a speaking voice, a greeting, and call controls, reachable on an inbound number or placed as an outbound call. Everything a chat agent can do, a voice agent can do too, including tools, knowledge, memory, and transfers.

Two voice modes

Every voice agent runs in one of two modes, chosen per bot. Both support the same tools, knowledge, memory, transfers, and call features, so the choice is only about how the agent hears and speaks. You can move a bot between modes at any time in its settings.

• Realtime voice is the most natural option. The agent listens and speaks through one live AI connection, and turn-taking, interruptions, and emotional tone are handled inside the model as it talks. Choose it for the most conversational feel. See Realtime voice.
• Classic pipeline runs speech recognition, the language model, and speech synthesis as separate stages. Choose it when you want a specific synthesized voice, a specific recognition engine for a particular language, or separate control over each stage. Recognition is covered on the Speech recognition page; voices on Voices.

Voice & greeting

Pick the agent's speaking voice from the gallery, where you can play a preview of each one before you choose. Then set a voice greeting, the first thing a caller hears, and the agent takes it from there. Which voices you see depends on the families your workspace has configured. See Voices for the gallery and the voice families.

In-call controls

Voice agents have controls that govern how a call behaves:

• End call lets the agent hang up when the conversation is done (end_call_enabled).
• Transfer hands off to a human or another line (call_transfer_enabled and call_transfer_number).
• Outbound allows the agent to place outbound calls (outbound_calls_enabled), with a cap on length (max_call_seconds).

How the agent handles quiet callers, interruptions, and turn-taking is covered in Voice tuning. What keeps a call smooth through a network hiccup is on Call reliability.

Inbound calls

To take inbound calls, map a phone number to the bot. Callers who dial that number reach the agent, hear its greeting, and start a voice conversation. See Voice numbers.

Outbound calls

An agent can also place a call. Give it the bot and the number to dial, and the call's outcome and transcript appear as a voice conversation you can review afterward.