Voice agents
Also written: Voice bots, Voice AI, Speech AI, Voice-native
Software that talks to people to help them with tasks.
Voice agents are computer programs that can understand spoken words and respond with their own voice. Think of them like a digital assistant you can talk to.
These agents can help with many things, like answering customer service questions or controlling smart home devices. For example, a company might use a voice agent to help customers track their orders over the phone.
Voice agents are AI systems designed for spoken language interaction. They typically involve speech recognition to convert user audio into text, natural language understanding to interpret intent, a dialogue management system to track conversation state, natural language generation to formulate a response, and text-to-speech synthesis to convert the response back into audio.
These systems are increasingly being integrated into APIs and platforms, enabling developers to build sophisticated conversational interfaces for various applications, from customer support to personal assistants.
Voice agents are appearing in news as companies like Microsoft and OpenAI offer tools and APIs to build them. These advancements allow for more sophisticated conversational AI, moving beyond simple chatbots to agents that can handle complex interactions for customer service and task automation.
- Introducing Voice Agents in Microsoft Foundry Agent ServiceMicrosoft · Microsoft Azure on YouTube ·
- Build, test, monitor and optimize a voice agent in Microsoft FoundryMicrosoft · Microsoft Azure on YouTube ·
- Tools in Voice AIGoogle · Google Cloud Tech on YouTube ·
- GPT-Live-1 is now in the APIOpenAI · OpenAI on YouTube ·
- Parloa builds service agents customers want to talk toOpenAI · OpenAI News ·
- Microsoft Copilot
- Microsoft Copilot is developing tools like Microsoft Foundry to help build and refine voice agents.
- OpenAI ChatGPT
- OpenAI is providing access to models like GPT-Live-1 through its API, enabling developers to create voice agents, and its models are used by companies like Parloa for building customer service voice agents.
- Voice assistants
- Voice assistants are a type of voice agent, often focused on p
- Speech recognition
- Speech recognition is a component of voice agents that conve
- Chatbots
- Chatbots primarily interact through text, while voice agents focus on
The concept of voice agents evolved from early work in speech recognition and artificial intelligence, with the term gaining prominence as AI systems became more capable of natural language interaction.
You can try interacting with a voice agent by using a smartphone's built-in assistant like Siri or Google Assistant. Ask it a question, give it a command, or have a short conversation to see how it understands and responds.
The Playbook: reusable how-tos, prompts, configs and tips pulled out of the news.
- WorkflowBuild, test, and monitor a voice agent in Microsoft FoundryEnd-to-end process for creating, customizing, testing, and optimizing voice agents using Azure Speech. · 120 min
- PromptRole-play a student struggling with math for AI tutor simulationSimulate a student's math struggles and uncertainty for AI tutor evaluation. · 5 min
- TemplateReusable workflow templates for healthcare teamsTeams can create and share templates for common workflows like documentation or prior authorizations. · 15 min
- TemplateTemplate for building an AI tool tailored to your workA structured approach to defining and building a custom AI tool for specific business needs. · 15 min
- TemplateEvals CSV prompt list for agent skillsA CSV file template for listing prompts used in evaluating agent skills. · 20 min
Questions people ask
- What is the difference between a voice agent and a chatbot?
- A voice agent interacts using spoken language, while a chatbot primarily uses text-based chat.
- Can voice agents understand different languages?
- Many advanced voice agents can be trained to understand and respond in multiple languages, depending on the underlying AI models used.
First seen on Subvolts May 7, 2026. Updated Oct 12, 2026. Written by an AI model from the items above and reviewed against them weekly; report an error.