Putting a voice agent on our own front door

There is a voice agent on our website. Her name is Mia. She answers, asks what you are looking for, takes a name and a number, and when the call ends she writes a summary of what was said and drops it into our pipeline.

We built her for clients. We put her on our own site first.

Three things a demo never shows

The first was a ringing tone. We play one while the call connects, the way a phone does, so the visitor knows something is happening. It plays through the speakers, outside the call's own audio path, which means the echo cancellation that normally strips out your device's sound has no idea it exists. The agent heard the ringing as the caller talking, decided it was being interrupted, and stopped mid-greeting. Every time. The fix was to keep the microphone closed until the agent's own audio arrives.

The second was phone numbers. People do not say a phone number. They say a piece of it, pause, check you are still with them, then say the next piece. An agent waiting for the whole thing in one breath waits forever. Mia now repeats the digits back as they arrive, then reads the complete number once at the end to confirm it.

The third was silence. If a caller goes quiet, something has to happen or the line is just dead air. We started at ten seconds and it felt like being hurried by a stranger. Fifteen was right.

What survives the call

The interesting part is not the conversation. It is what is left after it.

When the call ends the whole transcript is read once and turned into a small structured record. Name, contact, what they were asking about, and a short summary in ordinary language. That goes into our pipeline and into our inbox before we have looked at it.

It catches things a contact form never would. One summary noted that the caller wanted to be rung back after five in the evening. Nobody built a field for that. It was simply said out loud, and written down.

Why our own site

We would not pitch a system we were not willing to answer our own enquiries with.

Running it here means the awkward parts surface on us. The ringing tone problem would otherwise have appeared on a client's website, during a real enquiry, as a caller hanging up on a machine that talked over itself.

Every service we sell should go through that first. Not all of them have. This one has.