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An agent that can only talk is a search box with manners. Actions let it look up an order, check stock, or start something in your own systems. The tools we wrote arrive on; anything that reaches outside your business arrives off. Knowledge search, lead capture and escalation are what people set an agent up for, so making you go and find three switches would be a checklist before the thing works at all. Web search, your own API and every connected service start off, because those are reachable from a public chat by a stranger who may be trying to talk the model into using them — and that is a decision worth making one at a time.

Built-in tools

Switchable per agent. Off means the tool is removed, not that the model is asked not to use it.
  • Knowledge search — your own material, always searched first. Two switches: one for chat and WhatsApp, one for calls. Both on.
  • Web search — runs on the model provider’s side, so it is only available on models that offer it.
  • Capture lead — see Leads.
  • Escalate — hand the conversation to a person. See Escalation.
  • End the call — on calls only. The agent hangs up once the conversation is genuinely finished. See Voice.
  • Book a call back — somebody asks to be called later and the agent books it; your number rings them at that time. See Voice.

Booking into your own calendar

Different from Book a call back above, and worth keeping straight: that has your number ring the customer, this puts a real meeting in your diary at a time you were genuinely free. Connect Cal.com and the agent can read your availability, offer real times, and book — with Cal.com sending the confirmation. Twelve switches, all starting off. See Calendar.

Filling in your own spreadsheet

The agent takes a caller’s details and writes them into a row of your spreadsheet as it goes, and can look somebody up in the same table to answer from what you already hold. Connect your own Grist account; two switches, both starting off. See Spreadsheet.
Your calendar and spreadsheet switches share one budget: eight on at once. An agent given too many tools gets worse at choosing between them, so we stop you at eight rather than let it quietly degrade.

Reaching the customer on a different channel

A caller needs a link sent to them. A customer on WhatsApp would rather be phoned. These are the tools for that, and they have their own block on the Actions page because they share something the others do not: each one reaches the customer outside the conversation the agent is in. All three start off, and two of them cost money each time. Turning one on is not quite enough on its own — each also needs something only you can give it, and the row says so when it is missing.
“Ring the customer now” is not the same switch as “Book a call back”. One is a customer asking to be rung later; the other is the agent ringing them while it is already talking to them somewhere else. You can have either, both, or neither.
The agent never chooses the destination. It cannot be told “email this to another address” or “call this number instead” — there is no such thing to say. The number or address is resolved from your records at the moment of sending, from the same evidence that links a person across channels. So the worst a visitor can talk the agent into is contacting the right person at the wrong moment.
A few consequences worth expecting:
  • A WhatsApp template costs money, the same as any other template send. The agent may send two an hour in one conversation, so a customer who keeps asking — or tries to make it loop — cannot run up your bill.
  • Emails are capped the same way, at three an hour in one conversation. Enough for the invoice and the corrected invoice, not enough to flood an inbox.
  • The agent will refuse in words when it has no usable number or address — it says so and carries on helping, rather than pretending it sent something.

Call your own API

Point the agent at an HTTPS endpoint of yours, describe what it does and what it takes, and the agent can call it mid-conversation. Full guide, including how to write the endpoint safely.
  • Credentials are encrypted at rest and are not readable from the dashboard.
  • The URL is validated and DNS-resolved before we fetch it, so an endpoint cannot be used to reach inside our network.
  • Your header secret is never shown again after you save it.

Connect a service (MCP)

21 services with addresses read from the official registry and grouped by what they do, plus any address you want to paste. A further 1,434 services are listed in the directory. Sign-in happens in a popup and tokens are sealed and renewed automatically, so nobody signs in twice.
Asana, Xero and Shopify need a manual step. Those vendors do not support dynamic client registration, so connecting them currently means registering an app on their side yourself. It works; it is not one-click, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it mid-setup.

Send what happens somewhere else

Signed outbound webhooks to any HTTPS endpoint. This is the lane that reaches Google Sheets, Zoho and effectively any CRM through Zapier or Make today. Paste an address — or an email address, if your helpdesk opens tickets that way — and pick what it should be told about. A finished call carries whether it was answered, missed or refused, so a missed call is something your own system can act on rather than something you find out by opening ours. Every delivery is signed with a secret shown once when you add the endpoint, so your receiver can prove the request came from us. An endpoint that fails five times in a row is switched off and says so, rather than retrying into a wall.
New events do not arrive uninvited. An endpoint added before an event existed keeps receiving exactly what it did before. Tick the new one when you are ready for it — a receiver built for leads should not be woken by a phone call it has never seen the shape of.

Two limits worth knowing

Eight tools per agent. Every tool’s schema is re-sent on every turn, and models get measurably worse at choosing as the list grows. The cap is a quality decision, not a licensing one. Every discovered tool arrives off. Enabling is one deliberate act per tool. A newly connected service does not silently gain the agent thirty new capabilities.

Name protection

Third-party tools are namespaced, so nothing you connect can register itself as your own knowledge search and quietly take over your own material.