Agents

What is an agent

An agent is one saved configuration that answers a caller, holding its persona, its model, its voice, its knowledge, its tools and the channels it is reachable on.

An agent is one saved configuration in your workspace. It holds what the agent says, which model thinks for it, which voice it speaks with, what it is allowed to read, what it is allowed to do, and where people can reach it. An agent costs you nothing until a conversation starts; every conversation it has uses the settings saved on it at that moment.

What an agent is made of

Each part is edited on its own tab, so you can change any one of them without touching the rest.

Part What it decides Where you set it
Persona The agent's name, the description your colleagues see, its instructions and its opening line Persona tab
Model Which model answers, and how hard it reasons before it replies Voice tab, under Model
Voice The voice it speaks with, per language, and the speech settings for that voice Voice tab, under Used Voices
Knowledge Which workspace sources it may read, and how much it pulls per turn Knowledge tab
Tools What it can do beyond talking Tools tab
Availability The time zone it works in and the hours it answers Settings tab
Channels Where people reach it; see Channels overview Channels tab

An agent always carries at least one voice, and exactly one voice in that list is the default. Through the agents API, a list where no entry is flagged promotes the first one, and a list with two flagged entries is refused with Exactly one voice can be the default.

Knowledge comes in two kinds: an uploaded document, and a web page or crawled site. Tools come in three kinds, webhook, integration and openapi, plus the three built-in tools web_search, dialect_detection and end_conversation.

The channels an agent can be reached on are whatsapp, messenger, instagram, slack, sms, twilio, web_voice, web_chat, google_calendar, zendesk, zoho_desk, intercom and genesys. Channels overview says what each one carries and how it is connected; web_voice and web_chat are the playground, and google_calendar is the Google Calendar integration, which gives the agent calendar tools rather than a place to be reached.

An agent is either live or archived

There are two states and no third one. The agent detail header shows a live agent as Live and an archived agent as Archived, and the button beside it reads Pause Agent or Restore. Archiving is reversible, and an archived agent no longer counts against your plan's active-agent limit.

Archiving stops the sessions you start from the portal. A channel bound to an archived agent still answers an inbound message or call, and those conversations are charged. To stop a channel, disconnect it or bind it to another agent. Agent status lists what archiving covers, and Channels overview how a channel is bound.

Sessions and turns

A session is one conversation with one agent. It is a voice or a text conversation, and its status is active while it runs, then ended, failed or out_of_credits. Each conversation records the agent, the channel, when it started, when it ended, and who the contact was.

A turn is one exchange inside a conversation: the caller says something, the agent answers. Turns are what you are charged for. Each conversation keeps a running count of its turns, the model's prompt and completion tokens, the characters spoken, the seconds of audio transcribed, the messages in and out, the failed sends, the response time and the tool calls.

What it costs

An idle agent costs nothing. A call is charged 2,500 credits for every minute it is connected, and every turn is charged for its AI usage as the conversation runs. What a turn costs breaks down what a conversation is charged for.

Get it right

One agent per job beats one agent for everything. The prompt, the knowledge and the tools are all set once per agent, so a single agent covering unrelated jobs carries instructions that are wrong most of the time.

Recommended

Support agent: orders, deliveries, returns. Knowledge: returns policy, delivery FAQ.
Booking agent: appointments only. Tools: calendar booking.

Less effective

One agent: support, bookings, sales, recruitment. Knowledge: every document in the workspace.

FAQ

Do I pay for an agent that is sitting there?

No. Credits are charged for conversations: their connected time on a call and their AI usage. An agent with no conversations costs nothing, though it does count against your plan's active-agent limit until you archive it.

Can two agents share the same voice or the same document?

Yes. Voices and knowledge sources belong to the workspace, and any number of agents can use them. Each agent keeps its own tuning and its own selection.

Does changing a setting affect a call that is running?

No. A conversation finishes on the settings it started with. Start a new conversation to hear a change.

How many agents can I have?

As many as your plan allows live at once. Archive the ones you are not using; archived agents do not count.

Can one agent answer on several channels?

Yes. An agent can be bound to several channels, and every one of them gets the same persona, model, voice, knowledge and tools. See Channels overview.

Start here for each part of an agent:

And for the rest of this page: