An AI voice agent.
That you don't have to operate.

An AI voice agent is a software agent that places and receives phone calls on your behalf — speaking in natural language, handling interruptions, completing transactions and writing back to your systems. It is the voice equivalent of an AI chatbot, built on speech-to-text, large language model and text-to-speech components. FrictionZero builds production AI voice agents for UK businesses on top of platforms like Vapi, Retell, Bland and OpenAI Realtime.

Vapi, Retell, Bland and Synthflow are platforms — they sell you the engine and a console. FrictionZero is the agency that uses those engines to build a finished voice agent for your business: call flow design, voice tuning, CRM integration, telephony provisioning, GDPR / PECR compliance, ongoing optimisation. Most teams underestimate how much engineering separates a Vapi demo from a production AI voice agent. We do that engineering.

Yes — for the use cases we deploy. Modern voices (ElevenLabs, OpenAI Realtime, Deepgram Aura) are essentially indistinguishable from human on a phone line for transactional calls under two minutes. Long-form rapport calls still benefit from a hybrid human-AI model. We test voices with your real customer segment as part of the build.

Production-grade tasks today: inbound call answering and triage, outbound qualification and appointment booking, payment collection, customer support tier-1, callback scheduling, post-call surveys, debt and arrears reminders (where compliant), order status updates. We do not currently recommend AI voice for regulated advisory conversations (financial advice, legal counsel) — those are human-led with AI assist.

Yes — when run compliantly. Inbound AI voice answering is unregulated beyond standard call-recording disclosure (two-party-consent, GDPR). Outbound AI calling is governed by PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) — every dial must be screened against the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) or Corporate TPS register, you must disclose identity and purpose at call start, and honour opt-outs immediately. ICO enforcement applies the same standards to AI as to human callers. See our /ai-cold-calling-uk page for the deeper legal explainer.

Every call produces a structured record — caller, intent, outcome, transcript, sentiment — that writes back to HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho or any custom CRM via API. Calendar bookings sync to Google Calendar, Outlook or Calendly. Payments flow through Stripe. The voice agent is fully CRM-native, not a parallel silo.

Standard deployments go live in 4–6 weeks. Inside that: discovery, call flow design (1 week), voice selection and tuning (1 week), CRM/calendar/telephony integration (2 weeks), UAT and a controlled rollout (1–2 weeks). Outbound campaigns add TPS/CTPS infrastructure to the build.

Three layered costs: (1) per-minute infrastructure — speech-to-text, LLM, text-to-speech, telephony — typically £0.06–£0.18 per minute depending on stack; (2) FrictionZero implementation fee; (3) a share of measurable uplift versus the baseline (answered calls, bookings, collected revenue). The Friction Audit gives you a precise TCO and ROI projection for your call volumes.