Voice AI Agents
Phone and voice assistants that answer, qualify, book and route calls in natural speech — with clean handover to a person.
Voice is the hardest AI interface to get right and the one customers judge fastest. Half a second of extra latency reads as awkwardness. A missed interruption reads as rudeness. The models are now good enough that natural phone conversation is achievable — but only with the streaming, turn-taking and fallback engineering built underneath.
Who this is for
Businesses missing calls outside office hours or during peaks. Clinics, salons, trades and service companies where booking happens by phone. Sales teams where speed of first response decides the outcome. Any operation where the phone still rings more than the inbox fills.
Problems we solve
- Unanswered calls. Every missed call after hours is a customer who calls a competitor next.
- Latency that breaks the illusion. A pause long enough that the caller starts talking over it.
- No interruption handling. An assistant that talks through a caller trying to correct it.
- Accent and noise failures. Transcription that degrades badly on real phone lines.
- Dead ends. No route to a human when the caller clearly needs one.
What we build
- Inbound call handling: answering, qualifying, routing and booking
- Streaming speech-to-text and text-to-speech tuned for low end-to-end latency
- Barge-in support, so callers can interrupt naturally
- Calendar and CRM integration for real availability and real records
- Warm transfer to a human with the conversation context carried over
- Call recording, transcription and summary written back to your systems
- Outbound reminders and confirmations where regulations permit
How we work
We optimise the whole latency budget rather than any one component, because the caller experiences the total. Conversations are scripted for the common paths and given an explicit, early escalation route for everything else. We test on real phone audio — compressed, noisy, accented — rather than clean studio recordings, because that is where voice systems actually fail.
Technologies we use
Streaming speech recognition and neural text-to-speech, telephony through SIP and cloud voice providers, Claude or GPT for dialogue management, Redis for call state, and integration into calendars, CRMs and helpdesks. Self-hosted speech models are available where call content cannot leave your network.
Business benefits
- Calls answered at any hour without night staffing
- Peak-time queues absorbed instead of abandoned
- Bookings written directly into the calendar with no transcription step
- Every call transcribed and summarised for review and training
Where it pays off
- Appointment booking, rescheduling and reminders
- Out-of-hours enquiry capture and qualification
- Order status and account questions over the phone
- Call routing based on what the caller actually says rather than menu presses
- Rapid callback on inbound sales enquiries
Common questions
Will callers know it is not a person?
Most will, and we recommend saying so at the start. Many jurisdictions require disclosure, and callers respond better to a competent assistant that is upfront than to one attempting a disguise.
What happens if it cannot help?
It transfers to a human with the context already gathered, so the caller does not repeat themselves. We design the escalation path before the happy path.
Can it handle our customers' accents?
Modern speech recognition handles a wide range well, but performance varies by accent, line quality and background noise. We test against recordings of your real calls before committing, and tell you honestly what accuracy to expect.
Missing calls you cannot afford to miss? Start with out-of-hours and measure what it recovers.