AI voice agents & AI receptionistsEvery missed call is a customer who rang someone else.
An AI voice agent answers on the first ring, at 2am, on a public holiday. We design the call flow, wire it into your calendar and CRM on Vapi or Retell, tune it until the pause before each reply disappears, and test it on real calls before it goes anywhere near your main line.
/ In plain terms
What is an AI voice agent?
An AI voice agent is software that holds a spoken conversation over the phone or in a browser. It combines speech recognition, a large language model and a synthetic voice to understand a caller, respond in natural speech, and complete tasks such as booking an appointment, answering questions or transferring the call to a person.
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/ The tell
Find the sentence that describes your week.
The things you would already have noticed if an AI voice agent applied to you.
- Calls go to voicemail outside office hours and most of those callers never ring back.
- The front desk spends its morning answering the same booking and opening-hours questions.
- You pay for an answering service that takes a message and nothing else.
- Leads from your ads call once, and whoever answers first wins the job.
- You want to follow up every enquiry by phone and do not have the staff to do it.
/ What lands in your hands
What you actually receive.
Concrete things, not a statement of intent. This is what is included in an AI voice agent build.
Call flow design
The greeting, the questions, the things it must never say, and the exact point where it transfers to a person.
Phone number and web widget
The agent on your existing number or a new one, plus a talk-in-the-browser button for your website if you want one.
Calendar and CRM integration
Appointments booked straight into your calendar, and a summary of every call sent to your CRM or inbox.
Latency tuning
Model, voice and hosting chosen so replies arrive fast enough to feel like a conversation, not a walkie-talkie.
Transfer and fallback
Warm transfer to a person on request, and a safe fallback when the agent does not understand.
Recording, transcripts and consent
Every call transcribed and searchable, with the recording disclosure your location requires spoken at the start.
/ Proof
Work you can open, not a promise.
Our public voice work is a learning platform where students talk to an AI tutor built on OpenAI and Vapi. The engineering problem is the same one a phone agent has: answering quickly enough that people stop noticing the technology.
/ How it runs
Four stages. No surprises.
3 to 6 weeks. You get a fixed timeline and a fixed price in writing before any code is written.
- 01
Map the calls
Week 1We list the reasons people call you, pick the ones worth automating, and write the flow for each.
- 02
Build and connect
Weeks 1 to 3The agent is built, given your knowledge base, and connected to calendar, CRM and telephony.
- 03
Test on real calls
Weeks 3 to 4We call it ourselves, then with your team, with accents, interruptions and background noise, and fix what breaks.
- 04
Go live in stages
LaunchAfter-hours calls first, then overflow, then the main line once you trust it.
/ Before you buy
AI voice agent, phone menu or answering service?
All three pick up the phone. What differs is whether the caller's problem is solved by the end of the call.
| Criteria | Phone menu (IVR) | Answering service | AI voice agent |
|---|---|---|---|
| How callers interact | Press 1, press 2 | Talk to a person reading a script | Talk naturally |
| Books appointments | No | Sometimes, by passing a message on | Yes, directly in your calendar |
| Availability | Always | Depends on the plan | Always |
| Cost model | Flat phone-system fee | Per call or per minute of staff time | Per minute of usage |
| Weak point | Callers hang up | Takes messages, rarely resolves | Needs careful design for complex or sensitive calls |
/ The awkward questions
The ones you were going to ask anyway.
Answered here so you do not have to spend a call on them.
AI Voice Agents FAQ · reviewed
How much does an AI voice agent cost?
Projects start from $2,000. There is a one-off build cost and a usage cost. Usage is billed per minute by the voice platform. As of October 2026, published platform pricing runs from roughly $0.07 to $0.31 per minute depending on the model and voice chosen, plus telephony charges. We quote a fixed build price and estimate your monthly usage from your call volume during discovery.
Is there a free AI voice agent?
Free tiers exist for testing, but they are small. For example, some platforms include around 15 minutes a month or a one-time $10 credit, and free plans may not include a commercial licence. For a line that real customers call, plan for per-minute pricing with a monthly spending cap.
Does it sound like a robot?
Current synthetic voices are natural enough that most callers hold a normal conversation. What gives an agent away is usually a slow reply, not the voice. That is why we spend time on response speed and on handling interruptions.
Can it transfer a call to a real person?
Yes. The agent can transfer on request, when it detects an urgent or sensitive topic, or when it does not understand after a set number of tries. It can pass a short summary to the person who picks up.
Can I keep my existing phone number?
Usually yes. The common setups are forwarding your current number to the agent for after-hours or overflow calls, or porting the number to a telephony provider such as Twilio.
Do callers have to be told they are speaking to an AI?
Rules vary by country and state, and call recording often needs consent. We build the disclosure into the greeting by default. This is not legal advice, and you should confirm the requirements for your location and industry.
/ Notes from the foundry
Further reading
- What is an AI voice agent, and when is one worth it?An AI voice agent answers the phone, talks naturally and books the appointment. Here is how one works, what it costs to run, and when not to use one.
- Voice interfaces fail on latency, not languageUsers don't notice a voice AI's grammar. They notice the half-second of silence before it answers.
- Giving an AI agent permission to actThe permission model is the hardest part of an agentic system, and the part most teams bolt on after something has already gone wrong.
/ Same team, different problem
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