What it is for
Phony answers. Somebody calls your number or opens the chat widget on your site, and an agent picks up, knows what you sell, answers the ordinary questions, works out whether this is a real enquiry, and either books something or hands over to a person. The transcript, the outcome and the person become records you can act on.
The thing it is genuinely good at is speed to lead. An enquiry answered in thirty seconds converts at a completely different rate from one answered in a day, and the reason most companies answer in a day is that nobody was free at 8pm on a Sunday. That is the whole proposition.
Overview
Last 7 days
The screens
| Screen | Address | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | /phony | Volume, outcomes, spend. |
| Activity | /phony/activity | Everything that happened, newest first. |
| Chats | /phony/chats | Web chat conversations and transcripts. |
| Calls | /phony/calls | Phone calls, transcripts, and why a call was allowed. |
| People | /phony/people | Who the agent spoke to, and what became of them. |
| Reports | /phony/reports | Outcomes over time. |
| Agent | /phony/agents | The agent itself: voice, brief, behaviour, handover. |
| Try it | /phony/try | Talk to your own agent from the browser. |
| Knowledge | /phony/knowledge | What the agent knows about your business. |
| Team | /phony/team | Who gets handed a conversation. |
| Agency | /phony/agency | Managing agents for several clients. |
The outbound ceiling
Outbound is deliberately capped. The agent will call somebody back who just called you, respond fast to a form submission on a domain you have verified, and make informational calls where an existing relationship exists. It will not do cold outreach, list dialling, or bulk upload of numbers to call — and there is no plan to add them. Those are where the class actions live, and refusing them is a product decision rather than a roadmap gap.
The consent check is not advisory. A dial path that skips it does not exist, permission is bound to the specific destination number rather than merely requested, and an outbound record with no recorded basis is rejected by the database itself. Consent is re-checked at the moment of dialling, not only when the callback was queued, and a call that would land in quiet hours is deferred rather than dropped.
Recording
Recording is off by default. Turning it on adds the recording notice to the agent's spoken disclosure automatically, and the notice is spoken only when recording actually started — so the agent cannot announce a recording that is not happening, or record without announcing. The notice is voice-only and cannot appear in a chat transcript.
Recordings are stored by us, and the carrier's copy is deleted. Where a recording is passed to another module it travels as a link, never as bytes.
The intended retention ceiling for recordings is 90 days. Nothing currently sweeps them automatically. If a retention period matters to you contractually, say so before you turn recording on rather than assuming the ceiling enforces itself.
In this section
Configuring a Phony agent in erp.io: the brief, voice, behaviour, handover, and the prompt-variable failure that makes an agent promise things it cannot do.
KnowledgeAvailableWhat a Phony agent knows: crawling your site, the page cap that silently truncates a large corpus, scoping, and how to tell a thin corpus from a broken brief.
CallsAvailableThe phone side of Phony: numbers, what a call record contains, the "why we were allowed to call" panel, and where the latency actually goes.
ChatsAvailableThe Phony chat widget: putting it on a site, the popup behaviour, scoping per property, and the edge cache that hides a working deployment.
PeopleAvailableWhat happens after a Phony agent qualifies somebody: the person record, the hand-off to CRM, and the two reasons a lead appears to vanish.
Phony reportsAvailableOutcomes, volume and spend in Phony — which numbers are worth watching and how call-time metering is recorded.
What this does not do
No list dialling, no CSV upload of numbers, no consent attestation you type in yourself.
The agent works from what somebody tells it and from your published content, not from watching anonymous visitors.
Nothing appends data about a caller from an outside data provider.
Getting below that needs a speech-to-speech model rather than the transcribe-think-speak pipeline in use today. See Calls.
The ceiling is defined and not yet enforced by a sweep.
Questions
Why is it stored as "sdr"?
Historical. The key is the audience claim on every existing token and entitlement row. See Platform.
Does the agent say it is an AI?
It discloses. The disclosure is part of the agent configuration and is not something a workspace turns off.
Can it transfer to a person?
Yes, if you have configured somewhere for it to transfer to. See Agents.
What does it cost?
$0.12 a minute of call time, on top of your plan. Chat is not metered.