Plans and permissions:
- Add-on: AI agents, billed separately
- Change voice agent settings: Admin role, or a custom role with Voice agent settings set to Can edit voice agent settings
- Managers and Team Leads can view voice agent settings, but not change them.
Use the voice agent to answer your support calls with natural conversation instead of a push-button menu. It resolves what it can using your knowledge base, workflows, and business systems. When a caller needs a person, it works out what the call is about, collects the details your team needs, and transfers the call to the right destination with a summary.
To open it, go to AI support > Voice agent, and select a voice agent from the Voice agents list.
How the voice agent works
- Answers: the voice agent uses the same knowledge and workflows as your other AI agents to resolve calls. See Building workflows.
- Routing: it classifies each caller’s issue with your case categories, and transfers calls it can’t resolve to the destination you’ve mapped to that category.
- Handoff details: before a transfer, it collects details such as an account number, and your help desk receives them with a summary of the call. See Voice agent cases in your CRM.
- Brand: each voice agent uses a brand from Brand studio, which sets its voice, speaking style, and the custom vocabulary it should recognize.
- Insights: you can review each call’s transcript and outcome in AI quality > QA review.
Connect your phone system
The voice agent works with most IVRs and telephony systems. Your IVR forwards calls to the voice agent, by phone number or by SIP, and the voice agent transfers calls back to your team’s lines when they need a person.
- Go to AI support > Voice agent, open the voice agent, and select the General tab.
- Under Installation, choose a Method:
- Phone number: configure your IVR to forward calls to the phone number shown.
- SIP routing: configure your SIP trunk or IVR to forward calls to the SIP address shown.
- Select Save changes.
If you have more than one voice agent, How the voice agent is chosen shows how Assembled picks the right one for each call: by phone number, by an X-Voice-Agent-ID SIP header, or by a hex-encoded Voice-Agent-ID pair in the SIP user-to-user header.
For Zendesk Talk, see Zendesk Talk setup for the voice agent.
General tab
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Installation | How calls reach the voice agent. See Connect your phone system. |
| Brand | The brand that sets the voice agent’s voice, style, and persona. |
| Response pacing | How long the voice agent waits after a caller stops talking before it replies. |
| Legal disclosure message | A standard disclosure, such as call recording notice, at the start of each call. |
| SIP header mapping | With SIP routing, reads data from the call’s SIP headers, such as user-to-user (UUI) headers. |
| Welcome message | What the voice agent says when it answers. |
| Wrap up message | What it says when the caller’s issue is resolved. |
| Handoff message | What it says before it transfers a caller. You can set a different message for each destination on the Routing tab. |
| Knowledge Base Answers | Whether the voice agent answers from your external knowledge base articles: Off, On, or Preview Only, which uses them only when you test in the preview. |
| User memories | Lets the voice agent remember details about returning callers. See User memories. |
| Call transcripts | Select Add transcript to ticket to add the call transcript to the case. |
Routing tab
The Routing tab sets where the voice agent transfers calls it can’t resolve.
Case categories
The voice agent uses case categories to classify each caller’s issue. You can generate categories from past cases, or set them up from scratch. To manage them, go to Configure > Classification. See Case category classification.
Destinations and route mapping
- Under Destinations, select Add destination for each place calls can go, such as a support queue or an external transfer number. You can give each destination its own handoff message.
- Under Route mapping, choose the destination for each case category.
- Choose a destination for All other inquiries (fallback), for calls that don’t match a mapped category.
- Select Save changes.
Handoff tab
On the Handoff tab, under Collect customer details, choose what the voice agent collects before it transfers a call. It checks the data it already has before it asks the caller.
- Fields to collect on all cases: the basic details collected for every call, whatever its category.
- Categories: extra details to collect for specific case categories.
You choose the details from your smart fields. A smart field defines a piece of information specific to your business, such as an account number, with context such as where callers can find it and how many digits it has. See Smart fields.
When the call is transferred, these details and a summary of the call are posted to your help desk.
Test the voice agent
Use the preview on the voice agent’s settings page to talk to it and see its reasoning.
- Go to AI support > Voice agent, and open the voice agent.
- In the Preview panel, select Start session.
- Speak or type to the voice agent as a caller would.
- To test a phone number lookup, enter a Caller ID before you start.
- To start again, select Reset.
You can also test calls in AI quality > AI agent testing, where you see the transcript and the voice agent’s handoff reasoning.