Voice AI agents enable intelligent, conversational phone support by automating end-to-end customer voice interactions. This feature lets incoming calls start with an AI agent and, when needed, escalate to a human agent. Every call creates or updates a Zendesk ticket for tracking, reporting, and handoff context.

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Summary: ◀▼

You can use a voice AI agent to automate phone support, answer routine questions, route calls, and hand off to a human with full ticket context, transcript, and summary. It creates or updates tickets for tracking and reporting, supports multilingual conversations, actions, and testing before launch, and helps reduce call volume, repeats, and after-call work.

Voice AI agents enable intelligent, conversational phone support by automating end-to-end customer voice interactions. This feature lets incoming calls start with an AI agent and, when needed, escalate to a human agent. Every call creates or updates a Zendesk ticket for tracking, reporting, and handoff context.

These AI agents are seamlessly integrated with Zendesk voice and are built on our agentic AI technology, meaning you can take advantage of procedures and actions you’ve already built. Voice AI agents can engage in natural-sounding conversations with customers, including making small talk, disambiguating between topics, providing AI-generated answers based on your existing policies and procedures, and executing actions.

Before deploying a voice AI agent, you can test the call experience from the AI agents workspace. After a live test call, you can review the recording on the associated ticket.

Voice AI agents incur standard telephony usage charges, a charge for the time the AI agent is connected to the call, and a call recording charge. Call recording is on by default, but you can turn it off. Voice AI agent calls can also consume automated resolutions. For current rates and billing details, see Zendesk Talk number availability and pricing and About the automated resolutions tiers.

This article contains the following topics:

  • Benefits
  • How it works
  • Limitations
  • Best practices
Related articles:
  • Getting started with AI agents
  • Creating an AI agent for voice

Benefits

Voice AI agents offer multilingual, end-to-end voice automation for one of your most important support channels. From greeting to issue resolution to conversation wrap-up, voice AI agents provide an always-available first line of support for your customers.

Voice AI agents are best suited for the following types of use cases:

  • Account management
  • Authentication
  • Billing and payments
  • Booking and reservations
  • Call routing
  • Troubleshooting
  • FAQs
  • Order management

If a customer needs to speak with a human, calls can be instantly routed to agents based on omnichannel routing, tags, or actions. If a human agent is available, the customer is transferred. If no human agent is available, the customer can leave a voicemail.

When escalating, voice AI agents provide a seamless handoff to human agents with full context and conversation history. Escalated calls can be sent to human agents in Agent Workspace with a full transcript, concise summary, and a detected intent, so agents always start informed.

Voice AI agents let you:

  • Offer 24/7 phone support without adding staff. Provide 24/7 coverage that automatically scales during peaks and off‑hours, without adding staff. Reduce overtime and telephony costs by automating routine calls.
  • Resolve even complex calls and route right the first time. Replace IVR menus with natural conversations that capture intent, verify identity, and gauge urgency. Solve customer requests end to end, with knowledge‑grounded answers and policy-aware actions. Escalate to human agents only when needed, providing full‑context and reducing transfers and repeats. Route by intent and caller profile to the right queue or expert, cutting average handling time and after-call work.
  • Unify AI and CX for faster, more complete resolutions. Voice AI agents are embedded in the Zendesk suite, so ticketing, knowledge, routing, actions and analytics work as one. Call summaries with full context and detected intent mean less work for human agents and lower average handling time, eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves.
  • Trust every resolution with full control and transparency. Add instructions to AI agent responses, ensuring every resolution aligns to your customer service needs. Stay in control with real-time visibility into your AI agent’s chain of thought. Let AI agents operate autonomously and add precision and control when needed.

How it works

When a caller dials your phone number, the voice AI agent answers and attempts to resolve the caller’s request. If the voice AI agent:

  • Resolves the request, the call ends, and the ticket is updated. See Call flow: Caller to AI agent for details.
  • Can’t resolve the request, the call is escalated to your phone queue, routing rules run, a human agent answers with full context, and finishes the call. See Call flow: Escalation to human agent for details.

Call flow: Caller to AI agent

All calls to the configured phone number first connect to the AI agent.

  1. The call connects to the AI agent.
  2. An AI agent ticket is immediately created to log the call.
  3. The AI agent engages the caller and works to resolve the issue based on your configuration:
    1. The AI agent detects the appropriate use case based on what the caller says.
    2. Based on this use case, the AI agent chooses the best path to solve the customer’s issue:
      1. Replying with small talk or a disambiguating question.
      2. Retrieving an AI-generated answer from your existing knowledge sources.
      3. Performing steps guided by a generative procedure.
        Note: In cases where the AI requires a bit more time to process a caller’s query (for example, when calling APIs or retrieving answers from knowledge sources), the voice AI agent might use filler sentences similar to the following to avoid long silences:
        • “Hm, I’m looking for an answer now.”
        • “Give me a second.”
        • “Almost there.”
    3. Any ticket fields configured to be updated during the conversation (including custom fields) are updated in real time on the ticket.
  4. If the caller’s request is resolved by the AI agent, the call ends and the ticket is updated with:
    • A full call transcript
    • An AI-generated call summary
    • A link to view the AI agent conversation in the conversation logs
    • Any other ticket fields updated by the AI agent

Call flow: Escalation to human agent

If the AI agent can’t resolve the caller’s request, the call is escalated to a human agent.

  1. The AI agent updates the ticket before escalation by:
    1. Posting the call transcript and a summary to the ticket to prepare for handoff.
    2. Updating any other ticket fields you've configured to be updated through actions.
  2. The AI agent sends the call to your queue for a human agent to pick up.

    Standard phone number settings resume at this point.

  3. If you’ve configured an IVR greeting or custom greeting, the caller hears it now. If you prefer not to play additional greetings (to avoid double greetings after the AI agent handoff), configure a one-second silent greeting in the Available agents greeting.
  4. The call is routed based on your configuration:
    • If you use voice routing: If the AI agent updated the Group ticket field during the conversation, that group is prioritized for routing. If no group was updated, the call routes to the group defined in the phone number’s routing settings.
    • If you use omnichannel routing: Any ticket fields updated during the AI agent conversation (for example, Group or Skills) are used for routing. Your standard omnichannel routing configuration applies.
  5. The right agent is selected based on your routing configuration. The agent sees the AI-generated summary on the ticket to get instant context for a smooth handoff.
  6. The agent assists the caller and ends the call.
  7. A voice comment is posted to the ticket to capture the agent-caller interaction.
  8. The agent can complete post-call work.
    Tip: If you have Zendesk Copilot, it can assist the agent with after-call tasks. See Using generative AI to create call summaries and transcripts on tickets.

Limitations

Voice AI agents are not available with Talk Partner Edition (TPE).

Voice AI agents are not intended to be used to evaluate and classify emergency calls, or to dispatch or prioritize emergency first response services or emergency healthcare patient triage systems.

Best practices

When deploying a voice AI agent, keep the following best practices in mind:

  • Experiment with different tone of voice settings to optimize for natural conversations.
  • Use spoken, human-like phrasing in your dialogues and generative procedures. Always read welcome and escalation dialogues aloud to check for a natural-sounding flow. Avoid references to non-voice-friendly content, such as URLs.
  • In your escalation dialogue, add an AI agent message such as "Just a moment!" to let the customer know the escalation is ongoing.
  • Avoid duplicate greetings after escalating from the voice AI agent to a human agent. Add a short, silent greeting at the phone number level if your standard greeting isn’t desirable after an escalation.
  • Use ticket field updates for smarter routing. Create actions that allow your AI agent to set Group and Skills ticket fields during the conversation to drive precise routing, which is especially powerful when used with omnichannel routing.
  • Perform test calls that mimic real customer scenarios.
  • Periodically monitor the performance of your voice AI agent, occasionally listening to its call recordings or reviewing the associated transcripts.
  • Keep an eye on your voice channel billing information. See Reviewing your voice usage charges.
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