# Voice Agents

A Karmaflow.ai voice agent is an AI that holds a real phone conversation. It
answers the number you point at it, or it dials out when a workflow tells it
to. During the call it looks the caller up in your CRM, reads your published
knowledge, books and updates records, sends the follow-up text or email, and
hands the call to a person when a person is what the caller needs.

Every call lands in your workspace afterwards as a transcript, an AI summary,
an outcome, the list of tools the agent actually used and the knowledge it
actually cited — attached to the contact, so the next conversation on any
channel starts from what this one established.

## What It Covers

```mermaid
flowchart LR
    subgraph In["Inbound"]
      A[Caller dials<br/>your number] --> B
    end
    subgraph Out["Outbound"]
      A2[Orchestration,<br/>API or a person] --> B
    end
    B[Voice agent] --> C[Live CRM lookup<br/>by caller ID]
    B --> D[Tenant Brain<br/>published knowledge]
    B --> E[Tools: book, update,<br/>text, email, transfer]
    B --> F[Transcript · summary ·<br/>outcome · receipts]
    F --> G[Contact timeline<br/>+ every other agent]
```

**Answering the phone.** Point a provisioned number at an inbound agent and it
picks up. It greets the caller in the words you wrote, identifies them from
caller ID against your contacts, and works the conversation against your
instructions. If the caller reached you through a PBX such as 3CX, the agent
can receive the IVR selections the caller already made and skip asking again.

**Calling out.** Outbound agents are dialled by an orchestration step, by the
outbound API, by a helpdesk journey milestone, or by a person from the agent's
own **Use Voice Agent** page. Outbound calls detect voicemail and act on your
instructions when they hit one, and they can dial an extension after the
callee answers.

**Talking to a person.** A **warm transfer** puts the caller on hold, briefs
the human on what the call is about, and then bridges the two. A **cold
transfer** forwards immediately. You give the agent a list of forwarding
numbers with a condition on each, and it chooses; turn on the duty roster and
whoever is actually on call today is tried first.

**Doing the work, not just describing it.** Tools run for real during the
call: creating and updating contacts, tasks and deals, creating and replying
to helpdesk tickets, searching your document stores and your Tenant Brain,
sending the SMS or email the caller asked for, pressing keypad tones to get
through an IVR, starting an on-screen timer, recording an opt-out.

**Speaking like your business.** 52 voices, including ten that accept a
written speaking style and a set tuned for emotional range, plus 30 Gemini
voices that each speak every language where the Gemini beta is enabled. Multilingual agents carry
a different voice per language and can switch mid-call — either because the
caller asked, or because language auto-detection heard them change. A
pronunciation pack teaches the agent how to say your product names, and you
can add your own entries (paused on calls while we test them with the latest
voices; see [Voices, Greetings and Pronunciation](/help/voice-agents/voices-and-speech)).

**Being tunable.** Turn-taking, interruption sensitivity and the
silence-before-hang-up timers are all yours to set, with three presets
(Conversational, Fast-paced, Patient) for the common shapes. Every stored
value is shown back to you as the value the runtime will actually use.

## Why Teams Use It

- **The line is answered at 2 a.m.** — the same agent, with the same
  instructions and the same CRM, on the calls nobody was going to take.
- **The caller is known before they finish the first sentence.** Caller ID
  resolves to the contact record, and the agent is given that person's history
  — including conversations they had with your chat, SMS and email agents.
- **No "I'll pass that along".** The booking is made, the ticket is filed, the
  text is sent, while the caller is still on the line.
- **A transfer that a human can walk into.** The briefing means the person who
  picks up already knows who is waiting and why, instead of starting the
  conversation over.
- **An auditable record of every call.** Transcript, summary, outcome, tools
  used, knowledge cited — and for governed numbers, an attested computation
  rather than a figure the model invented.
- **Calls stop being a dead end for your data.** What the caller said becomes
  contact memory, feeds your quality signals, and seeds knowledge gaps for the
  Tenant Brain to close.

## Business Outcomes

| What you want | How a voice agent gets there |
|---|---|
| Stop losing after-hours and overflow calls | An inbound agent on the main line or the overflow line, answering every time |
| Shorter handle time on routine calls | The agent completes bookings, lookups and updates itself; only the exceptions reach a person |
| Follow-up that actually happens | An orchestration places the call, and the agent texts or emails the summary before hanging up |
| Fewer bad transfers | Conditions per forwarding number, plus the duty roster, plus a spoken briefing |
| Compliance you can show someone | Per-agent transcript retention, recording rules, opt-out capture, and an audit trail of what the agent was told |
| Spend that cannot run away | A daily outbound call cap at the workspace level, and per-workspace billing limits |

## What's Different From a Traditional IVR or a Bolt-On Voicebot

| | Phone tree / IVR | Standalone voicebot | Karmaflow.ai voice agent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understands an unscripted sentence | No | Usually | Yes |
| Knows who is calling | Caller ID digits only | Rarely | Resolves to the CRM contact and their history |
| Can finish the task | No — it routes | Only what its own integration covers | Runs your CRM, helpdesk, knowledge, calendar and connected tools |
| Shares memory with your other channels | No | No | Yes — one contact record across voice, chat, SMS and email |
| Briefs the human it transfers to | No | No | Yes, on a warm transfer |
| Cites where an answer came from | n/a | No | Yes — the Knowledge used panel on the call |
| Governed | n/a | Vendor's terms | Your prompt components, your retention policy, your approval gates |

The distinction that matters most: a voice agent here is not a separate
product with its own copy of your data. It is one more channel on the same
workspace your CRM, helpdesk and knowledge already live in — which is why the
call it takes today makes the email your mail agent sends tomorrow better.

## Learn More

Start here:

- [Create a Voice Agent](/help/voice-agents/creating-campaigns) — the setup
  flow end to end
- [Instructions, Goals and Scheduled Prompts](/help/voice-agents/instructions-and-scheduling)
  — what to actually write
- [Testing, Drafts and Going Live](/help/voice-agents/testing-and-promotion) —
  talk to it in the browser before anyone calls it

Then the pieces you will tune:

- [Voices, Greetings and Pronunciation](/help/voice-agents/voices-and-speech)
- [Multilingual Calls and Language Detection](/help/voice-agents/languages)
- [Turn-Taking, Interruptions and Dead Air](/help/voice-agents/turn-taking-and-timing)
- [Phone Numbers and Caller ID](/help/voice-agents/phone-numbers)
- [Transfers, Forwarding and the Duty Roster](/help/voice-agents/transfers-and-escalation)
- [Placing Outbound Calls](/help/voice-agents/campaign-usage)
- [Tools, Knowledge and Memory](/help/voice-agents/tools-and-knowledge)
- [Browser-Based Voice Agents](/help/voice-agents/web-voice-agents)
- [Calls, Transcripts and Recordings](/help/voice-agents/call-detail)
- [Phone System Integration (PBX / 3CX)](/help/voice-agents/phone-system-integration)

Related: [Duty Schedule](/help/duty-schedule/voice-agent-tools) ·
[Orchestrations](/help/orchestrations/overview) ·
[Tenant Brain](/help/knowledge/overview) · [CRM](/help/crm/overview)

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