What is an AI voice agent?
An AI voice agent answers or places phone calls, understands speech in real time, and completes the task — booking an appointment, qualifying a lead, or answering a policy question — before transferring to a person when the request falls outside its scope.
Voice adds two constraints over chat: latency and interruption handling. A natural conversation needs responses in under roughly a second, and the agent must stop talking the moment the caller speaks.
The practical wins are missed-call recovery, after-hours coverage and outbound qualification, where consistency matters more than nuance.