Is AI cold calling legal?
It depends where you are calling, whom, and with what consent, and that is your responsibility, exactly as it would be for a person placing the same calls. In the United States the TCPA and state law govern automated calls, consent, calling hours and do-not-call lists; other countries have their own. What the agent gives you is the controls: a sending window with days, hours and time zone; a consent tick and a Reply STOP line on the text step; an opt-out honoured on every channel at once, including on calls already queued; and a record of every call, with the recording, the transcript and the time it was placed. Check the rules for your list before you press Start.
Does an AI cold calling agent sound like a robot?
It hears and speaks in real time, and on a call it uses the fastest model your provider offers so it does not leave silences while it thinks. The voice comes from Google, Amazon Polly or ElevenLabs, or from your own ElevenLabs or Fish Audio account, where you can use any voice in your library, including one you recorded in the browser and cloned. It follows your script and answers from your Q&A pairs, so it sounds like your company rather than a generic assistant. Transcription runs on Google or, on your own key, Deepgram, so what the person said is captured accurately for the transcript.
What happens when the prospect asks something the script does not cover?
It answers from the rest of the knowledge base: your documents, your Q&A pairs and your data points for prices, hours and lead times. If the answer is not in any of that, it does not invent one. Your instructions say what it does instead, which is usually to say that someone will follow up and to hand the thread to your inbox. Every reply it gives is stored alongside the material it was generated from, so you can read the transcript back and see exactly what it drew on, and add the missing answer as a Q&A pair for the next call.
Can it book the meeting on the call?
Yes. With a calendar connected, Google, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Cal.com, Acuity, Zoho, Square or HubSpot Meetings, the agent is given the real open slots for the week ahead and offers a few of them. When the person picks one, the choice is checked against the slots that were offered, written to the calendar and confirmed on the call. It cannot book a time that was not free and it cannot take a slot it did not offer. The booking is recorded on the contact and ends the sequence, so the follow-up email that was queued does not go out.
What happens when nobody answers?
The call is recorded in the inbox as no answer, against the contact, with the time it was placed, and the sequence carries on as planned. Whatever step you put after the call, a text the same afternoon, a second call on a later day, a final email, goes out on its own schedule inside the window you set. The call step also has a pace, calls an hour per number, so a list of unanswered numbers does not turn into a burst of dials. A reply on any channel in the meantime cancels the rest.
Do I need a dialler or a separate phone system?
No. Calls run on your own Twilio account, so the number, the caller ID and the minutes are yours, and Twilio bills you at its rates. Dialling and answering are separate switches, so the same number can take calls back when a prospect returns one. Texts run on Twilio too, or on Telnyx, SimpleTexting, Plivo, Vonage, Sinch, Bandwidth, MessageBird or ClickSend. There is no dialler seat, no per-user licence and no separate voice platform; the call is a step in the same campaign as the email and the text.
What does AI cold calling cost per minute?
Nothing from us. The plan is $25 a month or $200 a year for the whole account, with unlimited agents, contacts and campaigns, and a 14-day free trial. Twilio bills you for the minutes and the number at its rates, and your AI provider bills you for the model at theirs, both at cost and typically a few dollars a month for a busy agent. If you bring your own ElevenLabs, Fish Audio or Deepgram key for the voice or the transcription, those providers bill you direct too. Nothing is metered, marked up or sold as credits on our side.
Can it use my own voice?
Yes. Record a voice in the browser and clone it on your own ElevenLabs or Fish Audio key, then pick it for the agent, and every call goes out in that voice. Or choose any voice already in your ElevenLabs or Fish Audio library, or one of the stock voices from Google, Amazon Polly or ElevenLabs without a separate account. Each agent has its own voice, so an agency can run one client's calls in that client's cloned voice and another's in a stock one, with nothing shared between them.