Voice & personas
How the receptionist sounds and behaves: the persona editor, the two voice engines, greetings, languages, and speech behavior.
View as MarkdownThe persona page is where a phone agent becomes the business: its name, its greeting, its voice, and how it behaves on the line.
The persona
- Identity — the name it answers with and a role description ("the front desk at Bright Smile Dental").
- Greeting — the exact first line. After-hours can greet differently than daytime.
- Behavior — interruption sensitivity, whether it waits for the caller to speak first, what to do with silence, and the voicemail action (take a message, text back, or hang up politely).
- Transfers — the staff numbers it may transfer to, by name, with a whisper of context before the human picks up.
Two voice engines
| Engine | How it works | Choose it when |
|---|---|---|
| Cascaded | Speech-to-text → the LLM → text-to-speech. Full control over the voice model and temperature. | You want maximum answer accuracy and flow control — the default for receptionists. |
| Realtime | A single speech-native model conversing directly. | You want the lowest latency and the most natural interruptions, e.g. the in-widget voice overlay. |
Testing the voice
The service's test call simulates the whole pipeline from the browser — greeting, flows, transfers — before any real number is attached. Change the persona, call again, hear the difference. When it sounds like the business, go live.
Voice knobs are per-agent
Voice, language, and speech behavior belong to the agent, so a draft agent can trial a new voice while the live one keeps answering. Swap when ready — see Agents.