Agents calling agents: where phone calls are heading

First, what this is

A warning before anything else. This article is opinion. We make phone lines for AI assistants, so we think about the future of phone calls more than is healthy, and we have an obvious interest in the answer. Nobody knows how this goes. Be wary of anyone who gives you a year.

Our guess, in short. More calls will have an assistant on one end, and then on both. Those calls will get shorter and duller, which is a good thing. Saying you're an AI will become ordinary manners. Every call will leave something in writing. And the calls that matter most will still be two people talking.

Where things stand today

None of this starts from zero. Today an assistant can ring a restaurant and book a table, and it can answer your missed calls and take down what the caller needs. We know, because that's what our line does all day.

But nearly always there's a person on the other end. The host at the restaurant is human. So is the contractor ringing back with a quote. The assistant is the odd one out on the call, and it has to fit in with how people talk: the interruptions, the "hang on, let me check", the dog barking. That's the present. Everything below is a guess about what follows.

We think assistants will end up on both ends

Picture it. Graham's assistant rings the garage to ask whether the car's ready. The garage's line is answered by its own assistant, which knows the job sheet. One asks, the other answers, they agree a pickup time. Both write it up. Graham gets a note, the garage owner gets a note, and neither of them touched a phone.

Will two assistants bother with a voice call at all? We're not sure. It's slightly absurd, two pieces of software being polite to each other in spoken English. But a phone number is the one address every business already has, and the one thing no two companies need an agreement to use. So our bet is that the call stays as the common ground for a good while, even when nobody human is listening.

We think saying what you are becomes normal

At the moment an AI caller is a novelty, and people ask "is this a robot?" with some suspicion. We think that fades, the way it faded for answering machines. What stays is the expectation of honesty. An assistant that says what it is when asked will be treated as a normal caller. One that dodges the question will be hung up on, and should be.

Our line introduces itself as an assistant and says it's an AI whenever anyone asks. We'd do that whatever the rules said. On the rules themselves: they differ from place to place and they're changing, so treat this as general information and check what applies where you are. We've set out our reasoning in should an AI say it's an AI on a phone call?

We think the written record becomes the point

A phone call between two people vanishes when it ends. You're left with what each of you remembers, and you remember it differently. A call with an assistant on it ends with a summary: who, what, the price, the date, the next step.

Once you've had that for a month you stop wanting calls without it. We suspect the record ends up mattering more than the conversation, because the record is what you act on.

That raises a question people will ask more and more. Who else can read it? Our own answer is that we keep the written call and not the audio, that call content is sealed to the line it belongs to, and that calls are never used to train models. Whatever you use, ask. There's more in who can read your AI's call transcripts?

We think money stays with people

There'll be pressure to let assistants pay for things on a call. It would be convenient. A deposit for the table, a call-out fee for the plumber, done without bothering you.

We think that's a line worth holding. A voice on the phone can't verify who it's giving a card number to. So ours never reads one out and never agrees to a charge, and any deposit comes back to the owner as a decision. If assistants do start paying for things one day, we'd expect it to happen somewhere safer than a spoken call.

How we could be wrong

Several ways, and it's worth listing them.

• Businesses might get tired of it. If AI callers turn up in numbers, rude or long-winded, shops will stop picking up for them. The good callers would suffer along with the bad.
• Spam could ruin it for everyone. An assistant making one call for one person is nothing like a dialer working a list, but people on the receiving end may not stop to tell them apart.
• The apps might open up. If booking platforms let outside assistants in, a lot of calls become unnecessary. We'd count that as a good outcome.
• People might just not like it. Tastes aren't predictable. Some callers will always prefer a recording, or a person, or to try again later.

What to do in the meantime

Not much, and nothing drastic. If you run a business, make sure the facts a caller needs are written down somewhere: prices, hours, the areas you cover. A new receptionist needs that, and so does an assistant. If you use an assistant, give it clear limits before it rings anyone.

And if you're curious what today's version sounds like, the demo page has recordings of whole calls. Listening to one will tell you more than any amount of speculation, including this.

What we'd bet won't change

The hard calls. When something has gone badly wrong with a job, the customer wants to hear the owner's voice. When you're turning down a supplier you've used for years, you ring them yourself. When there's news in the family, nobody sends an assistant.

We don't think that's a gap waiting for better technology. It's what the phone was for in the first place. If assistants take the bookings, the hold queues and the callbacks, what's left is the small number of calls where a person needs a person. That seems to us a better use of a phone than most of what we do with one now.

Common questions

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