Spoken phrases

A voice agent writes most of what it says on the spot. A handful of lines should never be improvised: the first sentence a caller hears, the noise it makes while thinking, and the way it ends a call.

Those are spoken phrases. You author them under Agent, Saved Responses on the Voice tab, one version per language, and the call speaks them word for word.

They are the same objects as saved responses in chat. A saved response becomes speakable when you give it a spoken role.

The five kinds

Only the greeting is guaranteed to play on every call. The rest fire on a condition, which is why a line that is missing one of them fails in a way that is easy to miss.

Kind	Spoken when	How many to write
Greeting	The call connects	One per language
Acknowledgement	The agent is working on a reply	Three or four per language
Idle nudge	The caller has gone quiet	Two or three per language
Farewell	The call is ending	One per language
Answer	A trigger phrase matches	As many as you have fixed answers

Only published phrases reach a call

A phrase left in draft is invisible to the phone. This catches people out most often with a greeting: the words are written, the voice is chosen, and the call still opens with the platform default because nobody pressed publish.

Writing a greeting

The greeting is doing more work than any other line. It is the caller’s entire first impression, it happens before they have said anything, and it sets what they think they are allowed to ask for.

A greeting that works has four parts, in this order:

1. Who is speaking. A name. Callers talk more naturally to something named.
2. Where they have reached. The business, said plainly.
3. What this line can do. One clause. This is the part that stops the caller opening with “is this a real person”.
4. A question. Hand the turn over explicitly, or you get silence.

Good afternoon, you have reached Weston Dental on Queens Boulevard. I can book appointments, answer questions about treatments and fees, and take a message for the practice. How can I help you today?

Two things to avoid. Do not stack more than one sentence before the question: the caller is waiting to speak, and a long opener is heard as a recorded menu. And be deliberate about whether you announce what the agent is. Some practices want it said outright, some want the caller to simply be helped. That is a positioning decision, not a technical one, and it belongs to you.

Length is a real constraint

The console shows the spoken length of each phrase as you write it. A greeting over about ten seconds is long enough that callers start talking over it. If yours is long, cut the description of what the business does before you cut the question.

Writing acknowledgements

An acknowledgement is what the line says while the agent is working out an answer. On a phone call, two seconds of silence reads as a dropped connection.

Write three or four per language and keep every one of them short:

One moment.

Let me check that for you.

Sure, just looking that up now.

They are used in rotation. That matters more than it sounds: hearing the identical sentence twice in one call is the single clearest signal that there is a machine on the line.

Avoid anything that promises a particular kind of answer. A phrase like “I will answer briefly” commits the agent to something it may not do, and a caller notices the mismatch immediately.

Writing idle nudges

An idle nudge re-engages a caller who has stopped talking. Each one is spoken followed by the question the agent last asked, so the caller hears what they were actually asked rather than a bare “are you there”.

Sorry, are you still there?

Take your time.

Two or three, again in rotation, again short.

Writing a farewell

One line, per language. This is the last thing a caller hears, so unlike the other rotating kinds there is exactly one and it is always the same. A call that ends differently depending on which phrase came up would be strange in a way people notice without being able to say why.

Fixed answers

An answer phrase is spoken instead of a model-written reply when a trigger phrase matches. Use it for anything that must go out in exact wording: opening hours, a regulated disclosure, a price that must not be paraphrased.

Everything else should stay model-written. A voice agent whose answers are all fixed is a phone menu with extra steps, and callers treat it like one.

Languages

Every phrase is authored per language. A missing language is skipped rather than substituted, which is the safe behaviour: hearing a Bengali greeting followed by an English acknowledgement is worse than hearing neither.

If you add a language after the fact, walk back through every kind on this page and write its version. The console shows you which are missing.