Quick Start

In this article, you will get a brief overview of how Phonely can answer your phones. Phonely lets you use voice AI to answer your phones. But we do so much more than that. We give you the no-code platform that lets you build AI voice agents with automatic website imports into knowledge base (RAG vector DB), prebuilt integrations with your software and SOTA call monitoring and testing and reporting. In short, we give you the tools so that you can, rest assured, get your customers the support they need, when they need it.

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Building an AI Agent in Phonely

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Step 1: Learn the concepts

Phonely combines a few different technologies together to create AI that accurately answers your phone. We have a few key components that make this happen.

1. Phonely transcribes your customers calls

We use SOTA speech transcription models to transcribe what users are saying. Sometimes, these models aren’t perfect and can occasionally mis-transcribe information. Humans also do this over the phone, and just like humans, you can adjust what Phonely says when it doesn’t understand the user in your agent’s settings.

2. We respond using a Large Language Models (LLM)

a. The LLM’s are what actually react to your user’s message to generate responses to their queries. These LLM’s get their answers from several areas, 1) the Phonely knowledge base 2) the agent guidelines you set in Phonely 3) the workflow stages you’ve built b. All of “how” the AI responds can be configured in the agent design page in Phonely’s platform

3. We generate a humanlike voice

We rely on a number of different providers that produce realtime speech from text in milliseconds (i.e. elevenlabs, cartesia, play.ht and others). You can change a voice, accent, or language in the agent design settings

4. We analyze and display your calls

a. Every call gets an AI summary, list of action items and an automatically generated transcript. These are stored in the call history page, and can be viewed or filtered by the call performance, number, duration or more. b. We also have other handy dandy features like the dashboard and call paths to help you view how your calls perform in realtime.

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Step 2: Plan your agent

For businesses who answer over 2000 calls per month, we do white glove onboarding and agent build out! Talk to sales here Just like a person, your agent needs to be trained. You can do this by configuring the agent design page in Phonely’s dashboard to include all of the information about your business, software, etc. to build your agent. This knowledge base contains all of the information on how to do this, but first we still need a blueprint. Fortunately, with Phonely’s templates, we have taken a lot of the legwork out, and have probably built an AI agent for your use case that should need just a few minutes of tweaking! Check out the templates here Even if you’re using a template, the following is a helpful exercise to go through to help you build your agent: Define your 80% use case To do this, think about what 80% of your people are calling about. This is usually 1-3 things (i.e., scheduling/ rescheduling appointments). Jot down the questions that need to be asked, and the steps you would do to perform this task over the phone. These will be each structured as workflow later. Think about your software Oftentimes, having the AI integrate with your software is a crucial step of the process. When you’re doing this, write down which software you need it to integrate live (during the call) and which software you need after. This includes SMS messages, emails, etc., that need to be sent. Gather your knowledge base Phonely will integrate with a knowledge base to answer FAQ’s via an inbuilt knowledge base. To do this, you need to have a knowledge base handy. If you don’t have one premade, you can type your own or connect a website

Note: if you connect a website, it is handy to remove the unnecessary pages to prevent the AI from grabbing information that isn’t relevant.

Think about your call forwarding To get your AI actually answering your calls you have to either forward your existing phone line to a Phonely number, port your number to Phonely, or give your customers Phonely’s number. In virtually all carriers there are settings for this, and the easiest way to find out is to google “how to forward numbers on xyz provider”. Start simple, nail one use case and scale from there. Oftentimes we see customers come with us wanting everything to be handled right away. Barring enterprise customers, this almost always ends up being a ton of work. To prevent this, we recommend trying to nail one use case, and set up call transferring or, a generic message taking for other use cases. This lets you get comfortable building out one workflow and you can scale incrementally over time.

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Step 3: Build your agent

Now that you understand how Phonely works, and have a plan, lets dive into how to actually implement it in the platform.

1. Chose a voice and greeting message

Head to the agent design page to configure the voice and greeting message. The greeting message will be set as soon as someone answers the phone and can be completely customized to your business use cases. Phonely has hundreds of prebuilt voices to choose from providers such as Elevenlabs, Cartesia, Openai and more. However, if you don’t like any of the prebuilt voices, you can also clone your own to really be specific. Additionally, you can select and filter voices based on languages, genders, accents and more!

2. Set your agent guidelines

Your agent comes pre-formatted with agent guidelines. Agent guidelines will be something that the agent always has context to, across all workflows and when retrieving information from the knowledge base etc. Agent guidelines should be behavioral related, meaning if you want the agent to act a certain way, in a specific manner, or just want it to understand what your business does from a high level. You can write in or change the agent guidelines in any way you please, and if you do it always a good idea to keep in mind good prompt engineering context. If the AI was a human, the Agent Guidelines would be the information on general manners, business background and behavioral traits that the person had. In more technical terms, agent guidelines are where you set the “base prompt” of the agent.

3. Import your knowledge base

Now click on the knowledge base tab on the part of your screen. The knowledge base can be imported from either:

• PDF documents, word documents or other files
• Typed manually
• Imported from your website

Phonely’s knowledge base works using a vector database retrieval. Vector database retrieval works in a similar way to how a search engine works - meaning that all information you put in here is not immediately available to the agent. However, if you ask a question that is similar to something in the knowledge base, it will retrieve this information and use it in the AI’s response to the next question. Knowledge Bases can be tweaked and improved to optimize performance, and this is a service we provide to our enterprise customers.

4. Build Your Call Flows

Call flows are a series of questions, steps, or interactions with software that an agent should follow. You can think of workflows as specific tasks that would need to be done over the phone. For example, every time you schedule an appointment you have to gather the same information - call flows allow you to create, and define this script while keeping the agent completely focused on the task at hand. There are two types of call flows, inbound and outbound call flows. Inbound call flows have a few key concepts:

• Start Flow Block: The start flow block lets the AI know when it should perform this workflow. When it meets these conditions, the AI goes directly into this flow and it will proceed through the questions. The most common use case is to set one flow, per distinct action. I.e., appointment scheduling, callback information, and call routing would be individual, separate flows.
• Ability to transfer in between call flows: At every point in the conversation, all call flows are available to the agent. If someone wants to trigger a different call flow later, or during the flow, then the AI can switch between those flows. This lets the AI act more like a person because it can change dynamically based on request. For instance, if your initial flow identifies a caller as new or existing, the agent can then automatically move to a more tailored flow for that client type.

Outbound call flow key concepts:

• Trigger condition: Trigger conditions are the actions that are used to place a call. When these trigger conditions occur, they will immediately trigger an outbound call to be placed by Phonely. For example, if a new customer is added to your CRM, Phonely can automatically trigger a call to them.
• Trigger variables: Each trigger condition comes with its set of ‘variables’, which is information gathered from the source. E.g., if you are using the Google Sheets trigger condition, the variables would be the headers of each column in your table (first_name, phone_number etc.) For every trigger condition we will use the dynamic information we receive from the trigger condition to place the call. E.g., the initial greeting voicemail message can be customized using the individual caller’s information

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Step 4: Test, Deploy, and Monitor

After you’ve got your agent set up and ready to go, it’s time to let it do the work for you. Phonely’s Agent Dashboard Gain clear insights with Phonely’s performance dashboard. Easily track your agent’s effectiveness in real-time with key metrics like:

• Call duration (and its change over time)
• End call reasons
• Sentiment analysis (Positive, negative, neutral)
• Peak call times
• and call success rate

all easily digestible, presented in user-friendly graphs and charts. A/B Testing Want to optimize your call flows for conversions like appointment scheduling or customer qualification? Traditionally, this meant custom code and manual adjustments. With Phonely, not anymore. Gain fine-grained control over every aspect of your Voice AI agents. With A/B testing, you can:

• Test voice variations.
• Optimize workflows.
• Experiment with prompts.
• Fine-tune interactions at every stage.