What are agents

Vocode Agents are the core component of the Vocode API. Agents can be deployed to receive phone calls by attaching them to Numbers. Agents can also be used to make outbound calls via the calls/create endpoint.

At its core, the agent is an amalgamation of everything you need to build powerful AI assistants for your use cases:

  • Prompts – instructions given to the agent that control its behavior.
  • Voices – the synthetic voice given to your agent.
  • Webhooks – mechanism by which you can subscribe to agent events.
  • Conversational Dials – controls for how the agent communicates, like its interruption sensitivity.
  • Actions – tools available to your agent, like endint the conversation or transferring the call.

How to configure an agent

Agents can be configured via our Dashboard or via API. As with all of our API objects, Agents have list, get, create, and update endpoints that allow you to manipulate them as you see fit.

In addition to the other API objects enumerated above, agents have other reference fields that can be used to control agent behavior:

  • language sets the agent language (for more context see Multilingual Agents)
  • initial_message controls the agents first utterance.
  • initial_message_delay adds a delay to the initial message from when the call begins
  • ask_if_human_present_on_idle allows the agent to speak when there is more than 4s of silence on the call
  • llm_temperature controls the behavior of the underlying language model. Values can range from 0 to 1, with higher values leading to more diverse and creative results. Lower values generate more consistent outputs.