> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.thinnest.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Voice > Your agent answers the phone — with the same memory of each customer it has everywhere else. Voice is your agent picking up a call and holding a conversation out loud. It listens, thinks and speaks, and the person on the line can interrupt it. It is the same agent. The same knowledge, the same instructions, the same memory of the same customer. Somebody who messaged you on WhatsApp last week and rings you today is one person with one history. Voice has its own page in the agent sidebar, under **Deploy** — not a tile on the Channels page. Everything about it lives on that one screen. ## Turn it on In the agent sidebar, choose **Voice**. Off means the number does not answer at all. Nothing on the page runs until this is on. You can set everything up first and turn it on last. The settings are never greyed out, because the worst version of this is a real caller reaching a half-configured agent. Open **Website** and switch on **Answer here**, and your agent answers calls from the chat widget straight away — no number needed, on any plan. To answer a number people dial, go to **Phone Numbers** in the main sidebar — the Voice page links there too. Take one from us — that needs a paid plan — or bring one you own with Plivo or Vobiz, which works on every plan including the free one. Then choose this agent beside the number, and it starts answering. See [Phone numbers](/channels/phone-numbers). Ring the number. You should hear your greeting, then the agent. ## The settings ### Replies use Which model does the thinking. Leave this on the recommendation unless you have a reason to change it. The list here is deliberately shorter than the one for chat. A model is only offered if it can answer fast enough to hold a conversation — one that pauses to think reads as a dropped call, not as a careful answer. Your chat model is not used on calls. Voice is its own choice, because what makes a good writer and what makes a good speaker are not the same thing. ### Voice Which voice your customers hear. Press play on any of them to listen — reading the name tells you very little, and the sample is the whole point. Voices come in two tiers, on their own tabs: The everyday voices, and what a new agent starts on. Natural enough that most callers never think about it. Warmer and more expressive, at a higher per-minute rate. Worth it on a line where the voice is the first thing people judge you by. **The per-minute price sits on each tab**, so you can see what a choice costs before you make it, and again beside **Voice** once you have chosen. A call is billed at the rate of the voice answering it. **Both tiers are open on every plan, including the free trial.** Try a Premium voice on your first day if you want to — nothing is held back, and the only difference is the per-minute rate shown on the tab. Every voice speaks every language we support. The tier changes how a voice *sounds*, never what it can say — which language it uses comes from your agent's setting, covered below. ### How it should speak The rules the agent follows on calls, and only on calls. Your chat and WhatsApp replies are untouched. It comes filled in, so you are editing real sentences rather than facing an empty box. Change what you like; clear the box entirely to go back to the supplied wording. Two of the supplied lines are not style, and are worth keeping. **Write titles and abbreviations in full.** Speech is produced one sentence at a time, and a full stop inside a name ends a sentence early — an agent that writes "Dr. Iyer" can be heard stopping halfway through the name. **No brackets or bullet points.** Nothing pronounces a bracket. An aside in brackets is either read out as though it were the main sentence or lost. ### First words What the caller hears the instant they connect, before the agent has finished starting up. Leave it blank to use your agent's own greeting. Keep it short. It is spoken, and a caller who hears a paragraph before they can speak will talk over it. ### Say something while it looks things up On, and worth leaving on. Checking your documents or calling one of your tools takes a second or two, and this is what the caller hears instead of silence. Leave **What it says** blank and the agent says it in whichever language it is speaking — if you have not fixed a language, it works that out from the caller, so somebody who rings you in Tamil is answered in Tamil from the first word. Fill it in and it says exactly that, every time, in whatever language you wrote it. Keep it to a few words: it is covering a pause of a second or two, and something longer just leaves a new silence after it. Turn it off if you would rather the line stayed quiet. ## What language it speaks Voice follows the language on your agent's **Settings** page. Set the agent to Marathi and it answers calls in Marathi. Leave it on **match the customer** and it works out what they are speaking and answers in that. On a line where people open in English, Hindi or a mix of both, this is usually the right setting. ## Where calls appear Each call is its own conversation in the inbox, with its transcript, alongside that customer's chats. One customer record, one memory, one history. A call is genuinely a different thing from a message thread — it has a start, an end and a duration — so it reads as its own entry rather than being appended to a chat. ### The call log **Usage → Calls** lists every call the workspace has made or taken, newest first, with the transcript and the recording behind each row. Each one says how it actually ended rather than just whether it finished: | Outcome | What happened | | ----------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | | Answered | A person picked up | | No answer | It rang out — the commonest by far, and what retries are for | | Line busy | Engaged. Worth trying later; they are near their phone | | Declined | They pressed decline. Never called again automatically | | Not reachable | No such number, barred, or out of service | | Answering machine | Voicemail took it | On an outbound call the row also shows **which of your numbers placed it**, which is the question worth asking once an agent has spare numbers to call from. Export gives you all of it as a spreadsheet. A lot of *Not reachable* usually means a stale list. A lot of *Declined* usually means the wrong audience or the wrong opening. A lot of *No answer* is usually the wrong time of day. That is the whole reason the reason is shown. ## Your knowledge on calls Your agent searches your knowledge base on calls, the same as it does in chat. Both are on by default. They are **two switches**, on the **Actions** page, because looking something up costs a little more on a call than on a page — the agent has to find the answer before it can start speaking, so the caller hears a short pause. It is a pause, not a wait, and for most businesses being right is worth it. Turn the calls one off if you want the quickest possible line and your callers mostly ask things your instructions already cover. Changing one switch does not change the other. **The agent says something while it looks.** When it has to check your documents — or reach any of your connected tools — it says a short "one moment" first rather than going quiet. A caller cannot see an agent thinking, and a few seconds of silence on a phone line reads as a dropped call. It is on to begin with, and it is yours to change under **Say something while it looks things up** on the Voice page. ## Booking a call back "Can you call me after five?" — the agent books it, and your number rings them at that time. It works on calls and in WhatsApp chats, because that is where people ask. Say it however you like: *in half an hour*, *after five*, *tomorrow morning*. The agent repeats back the time it booked, so nobody is left guessing. **It only promises what it can keep.** If it cannot book one it says so plainly instead — and there are a few reasons it might: | Why | What the agent says | | ----------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------- | | The agent has no number that can dial out | It cannot arrange a call and offers to help now | | We have no number for that person | It asks for the best number to reach them on | | Sooner than five minutes away | Too soon — a redial is not a callback | | Further ahead than two weeks | Too far ahead to promise | | Three already booked for them | It confirms the ones already booked instead | **Outside your calling hours, it moves the time and says so.** "Call me at eleven tonight" becomes nine tomorrow morning, out loud, on the call — never silently, because somebody waiting by the phone at eleven is worse than being told. The hours are checked again when the call is actually placed, so a callback held up for any reason still cannot ring at a rude hour. The booking appears on the conversation in your inbox, and when the call happens it lands in that same thread — the request and the call it produced, in one place. Everything still waiting is listed together on [Voice Campaigns](/channels/voice-campaigns), with who, when, and what the agent said it would call about — cancel one there if it is no longer needed, any time before it goes out. Somebody who asks you to stop contacting them between booking and the call is not rung. Switch it off per agent under [Actions](/agent/actions) if you would rather your team called people back themselves. With it off, the agent tells anybody who asks that it cannot book one rather than promising a call nobody will make. ## Ending the call Your agent can hang up. It does so when the conversation is genuinely finished — after it has said goodbye and there is nothing left to do — and after it has told somebody with an emergency to hang up and call their local emergency number. **The closing line is always spoken first.** The call ends when the agent has finished talking, not part way through. It is deliberately reluctant. It will not hang up because somebody went quiet, because it could not help, or because the caller sounds annoyed — a person thinking, hunting for an order number, or talking to somebody else in the room is still on the call. If it cannot help, it says so and offers to have a person follow up, and stays on the line. Nothing to switch on. Every voice agent can do this, and the call record shows a short note saying why the call ended. ### Your own limits Under **When the call ends** on the Voice page. Leave any of them empty and that rule is off — none of them is on to begin with. The agent starts wrapping up before your limit and ends the call at it, so a long call finishes with a sentence rather than a dead line. Calls stop at twenty minutes whatever you set. Two settings, and the pair is the point. A twenty-second pause is usually somebody finding an order number, so the agent **asks** before it gives up: "Are you still there?", up to five times, and only then does the call end. Write your own wording or leave it blank, in which case it asks in whichever language it is speaking. **The count starts again the moment the caller says anything**, so a long call with several natural pauses in it never creeps towards hanging up. Ten to twenty seconds suits most support lines. Give people longer where they are working something out — and remember two or three of those seconds are audio still being processed, so five is really nearer eight. Your own phrases, separated by commas — "bye", "that's all", "thank you goodbye". The agent still says its closing line first. **Short words match inside longer ones.** "bye" would also end a call on "goodbye for now, but first…", so prefer whole phrases. **The agent cannot put a caller through to a person.** Escalation reaches your team by email, Slack or webhook and the agent says somebody will follow up — it does not transfer the call. If a caller needs a person immediately, give them a number to ring in your agent's instructions. ## Recording calls Off unless you turn it on, under **Record calls** on the Voice page. With it on, phone calls this agent answers or places are recorded, and each recording sits with its call in [Usage](/workspace/usage). Website calls are never recorded — they never touch the phone network, so there is nothing to record. Neither are calls on a number you brought yourself. Recording has to be asked of the carrier by whoever holds the account, and for your own number that is you rather than us. A number taken from us records normally — see [Phone numbers](/channels/phone-numbers). **Recordings are deleted after 89 days.** Download anything you need to keep before then. Once it is deleted it is gone, and we cannot get it back. Telling people they are being recorded is your responsibility. In most places it has to be said at the start of the call, and the wording that satisfies your regulator is not something we can write for you — put it in your agent's first words. ## Interrupting A caller can talk over the agent and it stops. This is how people actually use phones, and an agent that finishes its sentence regardless sounds like a recording. ## Calling customers Your agent can also ring people, from your own systems — a reminder the day before an appointment, a call when an order is ready, a follow-up after a visit. There are two ways to start one. For a list of people, use a [calling campaign](/channels/voice-campaigns) — **Voice Campaigns** in the main sidebar, where you pick which agent does the calling. For one call at a time, from your own systems, it is one request to [the calls API](/api-reference/place-call), which takes the reason for the call as words the agent speaks first: ```json theme={null} { "to": "919876543210", "purpose": "I'm calling from Sunrise Clinic about your appointment with Doctor Iyer tomorrow at four." } ``` You can only call people who are **already your contacts** and who have not asked you to stop. Those are our rules and they are not the law — automated calling is regulated nearly everywhere, and having a lawful basis for each call is yours to get right. ## A call button in your chat When **Website** is switched on, a call button appears beside the message box in your widget — visitors press it and start talking, without dialling anything. That is the whole of it. The button appears in the widget on every page the chat is already on, and disappears again the moment you untick it or switch **Answer calls** off. The playground shows the same widget your visitors see, so the button is there too. Press it and talk — this is the quickest way to hear your agent before anybody else does. The visitor's browser asks for microphone permission the first time. Until they allow it nothing is recorded, and if they refuse the button says so rather than failing silently. A call from the widget is the same conversation as their chat — same person, same memory, same inbox thread — so somebody can type a question, call to discuss it, and the agent knows what they already asked. ## Coming soon Customers press call inside the WhatsApp thread and reach the same agent. The surface is on the Voice page, marked **Soon** and not yet tickable. Prove your line on a phone number or in the widget first — the agent is identical when this opens. ## Things worth knowing before you go live Both switches matter. **Answer calls** off means silence. **Answer calls** on with no surface switched on also means silence — you have turned the feature on without telling it where to pick up. Calls have a ceiling. A call that runs unusually long — usually a line left open by accident rather than a customer with a lot to say — winds down and ends rather than running indefinitely. The same rule as every other channel: an agent that does not know something says so and offers to have a person follow up. On a call this matters more, because a caller cannot scroll back and check what they were told. Not "what are your hours". Ring your own number and ask the thing your staff dread — the awkward one, the one with a condition attached, the one where the honest answer is "it depends". That is the answer worth hearing out loud before a customer does.