Conversational, not a phone tree
Callers speak normally, interrupt, change their mind and go off-script. The agent handles that, because real callers do it constantly.
AI Voice Agents
BuildThe call gets answered. On the first ring, at 2am.
Voice agents that answer, qualify and book against live availability — and hand a warm call to a person the moment the conversation needs one.
Typical stack
- Deepgram
- ElevenLabs
- Claude
- Twilio
- LiveKit
- PostgreSQL
- Node.js
Written for: An owner-operator losing revenue to unanswered phones and unable to justify a night shift.
Who it is for
Is this built for a business like mine?Built for businesses where the phone is the front door.
These are businesses where demand arrives by voice, arrives unpredictably, and goes to whoever picks up first. If that is not your business, a voice agent is an expensive novelty.
What we see
A burst pipe at 11pm calls three companies. The one that answers gets the job, and yours went to voicemail.
What we build
An agent that answers immediately, triages emergency from routine, and books against real technician availability and drive time.
The detail that matters
It will not book two jobs an hour apart across town — capacity is modelled, not assumed.
What we see
Reception is on the phone while three patients wait at the desk, and the no-show rate nobody owns sits above ten percent.
What we build
Booking, rescheduling and confirmation handling, plus recall calls that actually go out on schedule.
The detail that matters
Built to the data boundary you operate under, decided during discovery rather than after.
What we see
Intake is the whole business, and it is answered by paralegals between other work — or not at all after five.
What we build
An intake agent that collects the facts, applies your qualification criteria and routes the case, with the transcript attached.
The detail that matters
It collects and routes. It never advises — that line is enforced in the tooling, not just the prompt.
What we see
Service bays are a fixed capacity sold by the hour, booked over one phone line by an advisor who is also handing over keys.
What we build
Service booking that respects bay capacity, technician skill and parts availability at once, not just an open calendar slot.
The detail that matters
Three constraints on one booking, or it books work that cannot be done.
What we see
The phone rings through dinner service, and the booking that was not answered becomes an aggregator booking with commission attached.
What we build
Direct reservations taken against live PMS availability, plus group and event enquiries captured with the detail needed to quote.
The detail that matters
Availability is read live. A reservation for a room that is gone is worse than a missed call.
What we see
A portal enquiry lands while every agent is out showing property, and its value has largely decayed by the time anyone calls back.
What we build
Immediate answering that qualifies the enquiry, books the viewing against agent availability, and logs it before the agent is back in the car.
The detail that matters
Qualification is tuned not to gatekeep — losing the buyer who was worth the call costs more than an extra viewing.
And who it is not for
If your calls are long, consultative and different every time, a voice agent will frustrate your callers. We would rather staff that line with people — which we also do.
The problem
Do they understand what is actually going wrong?Voicemail is a competitor’s lead-generation tool.
The economics are unforgiving: an inbound call is the highest-intent contact a business receives, and its value collapses to nothing within minutes. Yet answering every call means staffing for a peak that happens twice a week, at hours nobody wants, for conversations that are mostly the same four questions.
Calls outside office hours go to voicemail and are returned after the job has been booked elsewhere.
Peak periods produce four times the volume and the same number of people.
The generic answering service takes a message, which is not the same as taking a booking.
Nobody can say how many calls came in last Tuesday, or how many were missed.
What we build
What exactly would I be buying?It answers, and it can actually finish the call.
Taking a message is not answering the phone. A voice agent is only worth having if it can complete the transaction the caller rang about — which means live availability, real qualification, and a clean route to a person when the conversation stops fitting the script.
Booking against live capacity
Connected to your calendar, PMS or dispatch system, so what it offers is genuinely available and what it books is genuinely doable.
Handoff by rule
Transfer happens on conditions you define — call type, caller value, an explicit request — not on a confidence score the model calculates about itself.
Every call in writing
Recording, transcript, extracted details and outcome, in your CRM before the caller has put the phone down.
How it works
How does this actually function?Sixty seconds, start to booked.
Latency is the whole experience. Above roughly a second of silence a caller assumes the line dropped, so the pipeline is built around that budget rather than around a feature list.
Ring
Greet
Understand
Transfer to humanCheck availability
Book
Confirm
Speech, reasoning and response are streamed and overlapped so the caller hears a reply, not a gap.
Availability is queried live. Nothing is offered that cannot be honoured.
A transfer carries the transcript so far, so the caller never repeats themselves to the person who picks up.
What changes
What is different afterwards?What is different afterwards.
The after-hours call converts
The calls that previously became voicemail become booked jobs, and those are usually the highest-urgency calls you receive.
Booked work originating outside staffed hours.
Peaks stop being a staffing problem
Concurrent calls are answered simultaneously, so a storm week or a campaign spike does not need a hiring plan.
Concurrent calls answered without a queue.
The phone becomes measurable
Volume, outcome, duration and reason for every call — the channel that was previously invisible becomes the one you can actually manage.
Call reason and outcome, categorised, for every call.
How we deliver
How does this start, and what do I get at each step?Six stages, and every one has an exit.
You can stop after any stage with something useful in hand. That is the point of naming the artefacts rather than the activities.
- 01
Call audit
We listen to your actual calls. Every voice agent that fails does so because it was designed from an imagined conversation rather than a real one.
- Call type taxonomy from real recordings
- Volume and timing profile
- The call types we recommend never automating
- 02
Conversation design
The flow per call type, the qualification criteria, and the exact conditions that trigger a transfer.
- Conversation flows
- Transfer rules, written by you
- Escalation and out-of-scope paths
- 03
Integration
Calendar, dispatch, PMS, CRM — whatever holds the availability and whatever needs the record.
- Live availability integration
- CRM write-back
- Telephony configured
- 04
Voice tuning
Latency, interruption handling, accent and noise robustness, tested on real audio rather than in a quiet room.
- Latency measured under load
- Interruption handling verified
- Voice selected with you
- 05
Live pilot
One call type, out of hours first, monitored closely with a person able to take over at any point.
- Pilot report with recordings
- Transfer rate by call type
- Tuned transfer rules
- 06
Rollout
More call types and more hours, widened on pilot evidence.
- Rollout plan
- Monitoring dashboard
- Runbook and fallback to human line
Questions
But what about the thing that worries me?The questions people actually ask.
Will callers know it is not a person?
Many will, and the agent identifies itself if asked — we do not build agents that claim to be human. What callers consistently care about more is whether the call got resolved on the first attempt, which is the thing voicemail never does.
What happens when the caller asks something unexpected?
It transfers, on a rule you wrote rather than a guess. The person who picks up receives the transcript, so the caller does not start again.
Can it actually book into our calendar?
Yes, against live availability, and it books only what your capacity rules permit — technician skill, drive time, bay availability, room type. A booking that cannot be honoured is worse than a missed call, so those rules are modelled explicitly.
What does it cost to run?
Per minute of conversation, and the number depends on call length and complexity. We size it against your real call volume during the audit, so the comparison against a staffed line is arithmetic rather than a promise.
What if it goes wrong at 3am?
Calls fall back to your existing line automatically if the agent is unavailable. Failure means callers get what they get today, never a dead line.
The other half
Someone still has to take the transfer.
A voice agent set up honestly transfers more calls, not fewer — the ones needing judgement, the upset caller, the deal worth a person. That only works if a trained human is reachable when it happens. We run that line as well, which is the reason we can set transfer rules at the right threshold instead of the flattering one.
Voice CallsStart
What is the next step?Tell us the problem, not the specification.
A short call is usually enough to say which half of the business your problem belongs to, roughly what it costs, and whether it is worth doing at all.
Related services
- AI EngineeringAI AgentsAutonomous agents that plan, call real tools against real systems, and leave a trace of every action — with human approval gates on anything consequential.
- AI EngineeringAI DevelopmentApplied AI systems built with retrieval, evaluation and observability from the first commit — because those decide whether it still works in month six.
- Digital MarketingGoogle AdsCampaigns built to capture demand that already exists — measured against booked revenue rather than against the platform’s account of itself.