Browser-Based Voice Agents

A voice agent can run over the telephone network or in a browser. The conversation itself is the same agent — same instructions, same tools, same voice — but the surroundings differ, and a few telephony behaviours have no browser equivalent.

Set this on the Setup tab: Delivery Method → Web (Browser-Based).

What you'll need

• The agents:voice:manage permission.
• A saved voice agent — see Create a Voice Agent.
• A microphone, for anyone talking to it.
• No phone number. A web agent does not need one, and the Not deployable yet badge in the header — which tracks the missing number — can be ignored for this delivery method.

What changes

	Telephony	Web (Browser-Based)
Needs a phone number	Yes	No
Typed input alongside speech	No	Yes, with Allow Chat
Live on-screen transcript	No	Yes
On-screen countdown timers	No	Yes, with manage_timer
Background office ambience	Yes, when enabled	Never, whatever the switch says
Recorded	Inbound recorded by the carrier; outbound recorded by the platform	Always recorded
Warm / cold transfer	Yes	No — there is no call to bridge
Voicemail detection	Outbound only	No
Caller-ID contact lookup	Yes	No — there is no caller ID
Keypad tones (DTMF)	Yes	No

Everything else — instructions, greeting, voice, languages, turn-taking, tool execution, CRM writes, knowledge search, transcripts, summaries — works the same way.

Allow Chat

Setup → Allow Chat ("Enable text-based chat alongside voice") lets a person type instead of speaking, mid-conversation, without losing the thread.

It matters more than it sounds. People switch to typing when they are somewhere they cannot talk, when they have to give an order number or an email address exactly, or when the agent has misheard the same word twice. Leaving it off makes all three of those a dead end.

On-screen timers

Enable manage_timer on the Tools tab and the agent can put a countdown on the screen and manage it during the conversation — set it, pause it, extend it, cancel it.

The useful part: a running timer suspends the dead-air rules. "Take three minutes to find that document, I'll wait" normally trips the silence timeout and the agent hangs up. With a timer running it waits, and the person can see how long they have. See Turn-Taking, Interruptions and Dead Air.

Timers are a browser feature. There is nothing to show on a phone call.

Talk to a web agent from inside KarmaFlow

The browser client that ships with the product is the test panel on the agent's own form:

1. Open the agent → Test & Deploy tab.
2. Talk to your agent → choose Draft (last saved changes) or Production → Start voice test.
3. Allow microphone access when the browser asks.

You get the live transcript, the tool activity, mute, and per-stage timings when the run ends. Full detail: Testing, Drafts and Going Live.

Putting a web agent in front of your own users

A public browser voice experience — an agent embedded on your own site or in your own app — needs a web client that joins the conversation and issues its own access tokens. That client is not something you configure from the agent form, and the credentials it needs are issued from a platform-operator surface.

So: set Delivery Method to Web (Browser-Based) on the agent, get the conversation right using Talk to your agent, and talk to KarmaFlow about the client when you want it in front of customers.

Behaviours that will not carry across

If you are moving an agent from telephony to web, re-read its instructions for things that no longer exist:

• Transfer instructions. "Transfer to billing if…" has nowhere to go. Replace it with a task, a ticket, or duty_notify so a human still gets the handoff.
• Voicemail instructions. Not applicable.
• "The number you are calling from" and anything that leans on caller ID. A web visitor is not identified by a phone number, so the agent has to ask — make sure save-update-user is enabled so it can record what it is told.
• Keypad prompts. No keypad.

Run the reverse check when moving web → telephony: timers and typed input stop being available, and the agent should stop offering them.

Troubleshooting

• The header says "Not deployable yet". It is reporting a missing phone number. A web agent does not need one.
• No microphone / the test will not start. The browser blocked microphone access. Allow it for the site and start the test again.
• No background ambience even though Background Audio is on. Correct — browser calls never get it.
• The agent offers to transfer me and then cannot. Transfer tools do not work on web delivery. Remove the promise from the instructions.
• Typing does nothing. Allow Chat is off on the Setup tab.
• A timer never appears. manage_timer is not enabled on the Tools tab.

Next steps

• Testing, Drafts and Going Live
• Tools, Knowledge and Memory
• Turn-Taking, Interruptions and Dead Air
• Chat Agents — if what you actually want is a typed website assistant