A call record
Every call keeps who called, when, how long, the transcript, the outcome the agent recorded, and — for anything outbound — an explicit panel explaining why we were allowed to make this call. That panel is unusual and deliberate: it means the permission basis for a call is visible on the call rather than reconstructable from logs, which is the difference between being able to answer a complaint and not.
Calls
Last 7 days · 56 calls · 312 minutes
| When | Number | Direction | Length | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Today 14:22 | +44 7700 900412 | Inbound | 4:12 | Transferred |
| Today 11:03 | +44 7700 900188 | Inbound | 2:48 | Qualified |
| Today 09:40 | +44 7700 900412 | Callback | 1:55 | Requested by caller |
| Yesterday 18:31 | +44 7700 900733 | Inbound | 0:38 | Wrong number |
| Yesterday 16:02 | +44 7700 900255 | Inbound | 6:20 | Booked |
Where the latency goes
Conversational latency is the difference between an agent that feels like a conversation and one that feels like a machine. The pipeline has three stages, and it is worth knowing which one dominates, because the intuitive answer is wrong.
| Stage | What it is | Share of the delay |
|---|---|---|
| Speech to text | Hearing what was said. | Small |
| Model | Deciding what to say — time to first token. | Moderate |
| Text to speech | Saying it. | The largest single piece |
Because speech synthesis dominates, the optimisations that help most are the ones that start speaking sooner rather than the ones that think faster. Below roughly 400 milliseconds the transcribe-think-speak shape stops being the constraint at all and a speech-to-speech model becomes necessary — which is a different architecture, not a tuning exercise.
The same stage that dominates latency dominates cost — it is the majority of what a minute of call time actually costs to produce. That is why the price is a flat per-minute rate: the cost genuinely does scale with how long the agent spends talking.
Numbers and carriers
A number is attached to an agent. Inbound calls to it are answered by that agent. Adding a number is a configuration step rather than something you do yourself, because the carrier account a number sits on determines what the number is permitted to do — inbound-only numbers and numbers cleared for callbacks are not interchangeable.
The phone agent and the website chat agent share a brief and knowledge but run through completely different machinery. A fix to one does not fix the other, and a bug can be present in one and absent in the other. When reporting something, always say which channel — it is the first question and it determines where anybody looks.
What this does not do
See the outbound ceiling.
The agent answers. There is no press-one-for-sales tree in front of it.
Concurrent calls are answered by the agent; there is no hold queue for a human team.
Phony answers its own numbers.
Architectural, not a setting.
Questions
Can we port our existing number?
Ask. It depends on the carrier and the jurisdiction.
What happens if two people call at once?
Both are answered.
Is call time billed in whole minutes?
It is metered on actual duration.