How do I create an AI voice agent, such as an AI receptionist, and can the AI assistant build it for me?
The easiest way is to tell the AI assistant what you want in a sentence or two, and it builds the agent and maps out the whole conversation workflow. The minimum is something like: "I need to create an AI agent. I want it to be an AI receptionist for a dental office. The name of the dental office is Walnut Dental. Create it now."
After a few minutes it creates a complete AI agent set up to answer calls, with a conversation workflow that greets the caller, books, reschedules and cancels appointments, tells the caller they are booked, handles insurance or billing questions, emergencies, directions, hours and other questions, and says thank you and goodbye. It wires up the booking, cancel and talking steps for you. If you ask, it can also create an outbound sequence of calls, texts and emails and follow up with people at different intervals.
If your prompt is thin, the assistant fills in the gaps with what it thinks the agent should do, which may not be what you had in mind. The more specific you are, the closer the result: for example the types of insurance you accept and how to handle calls from other providers or insurance companies. You can give it a script to follow. Giving the details up front also uses fewer credits.
To build one yourself:
- Create an agent and choose Start from a website.
- Enter the website URL. Votel crawls the site, learns the business and writes a system prompt, plus facts about the business and FAQs. This takes about twenty seconds.
- Click the Test button and talk to the agent.
Either way, the agent lands in the agent builder, where you can review and edit anything by hand. Always test what the AI builds yourself with a test call, because the assistant cannot make a call and listen to how it sounds. Test mode also lets you simulate inbound and outbound calls, pick the workflow to simulate, and use voice mode, chat mode or workflow mode (where you process a contact or a JSON payload). Always test an agent before launching it for a client. An agent built from a prospect's website also makes a great demo.