AI EngineeringVoice AI
Voice AI
Call handling, appointment booking and triage, designed to answer on the first ring and hand off to a person the moment it matters. Every conversation is transcribed and logged for your team.
The calls that follow a script: booking, rescheduling, opening hours, order status, first-line triage.
A voice agent handles most of those end to end, including outside office hours, and passes anything off-script to your team with the context attached, so nobody starts the call again from scratch.
Where the missed calls go.
The routine calls are the ones you lose, because they are the ones nobody is free to take.
Phones ring while your team is with a customer, mid-task, or gone home. The caller does not leave a message: they ring the next number on the list. A menu tree does not fix it; it just tells the caller to press 4 and wait. A voice agent picks up, understands the request in plain speech, and either handles it or puts the caller through to a person.
Voice AI covers the routine volume (bookings, opening hours, order status, simple questions) so the calls that need a human get one faster, and the ones that used to go to voicemail get answered instead.
What we build.
OpenKit builds voice agents that answer on your own numbers and hand the call logs over with them.
- Inbound call handling
- Designed to pick up on the first ring, around the clock.
- Appointment booking & rescheduling
- Wired into your real calendar.
- First-line triage
- The caller’s need captured and routed with context.
- Conversational assistants
- The same conversation grammar on WhatsApp and web.
Every build ships with full call logs, handoff rules your team sets, and measured containment against your baseline.
Voice is one of four builds under AI engineering, alongside agents, retrieval systems and language-model development.
What the system is built on.
A voice line that holds up is mostly decisions made before anyone records a greeting.
- Scoped to the real calls
- We listen to what your callers actually ask for and where the current line loses them, then scope the assistant to the routine volume, not an everything-bot.
- A stack chosen for the job
- Natural speech via ElevenLabs, real-time call infrastructure via LiveKit, and a language model that knows your business: chosen for the job, not because we resell them.
- A designed handover
- The assistant introduces itself, confirms what it heard on anything that matters, and hands to a person the moment the call is emotional, complex, or out of scope.
- Wired into your systems
- Calendar, CRM, and telephony connected so a call updates the records you already use, with every call transcribed and logged. You own the result.
Taking calls in four weeks.
The agent takes real calls in week three, on a slice you choose, before anything goes near your main line.
- Week 1
Identify
Call audit: what actually comes in
- Scripts mapped
- Baseline measured
- Week 2
Build
Voice agent on your number
- Calendar and CRM wired
- Week 3
Prove
Live on a slice of real calls
- Handoffs reviewed with your team
- Week 4
Scale
Full rollout
- Team trained on logs and handoff rules
Where a voice build sits.
Voice is rarely bought on its own. It arrives inside one of two engagements, and the first one is where the call audit happens.
- Inside an AI Audit and Transformation
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The call audit is week one; the agent takes its first real calls inside the same engagement.
How the audit runs - As a Bespoke Build or with an Embedded AI Lead
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More numbers, more scripts, other channels: commissioned as one piece of work, or carried as a running queue inside your team.
How the embedded engagement runs
The phone line is being rebuilt around AI.
Customer service is where conversational AI is landing first. Three numbers worth knowing before you scope anything.
- 80%
- By 2029, Gartner expects agentic AI to autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention (Gartner, March 2025).
- $41.4bn
- The conversational AI market is projected to reach $41.39bn by 2030, growing 23.7% a year from 2025 (Grand View Research, 2025).
- 85%
- AI-mature contact centres are 85% more profitable than low-maturity peers (Deloitte Digital, 2026 Global Contact Center Survey).
None of those numbers tells you which of your calls should be automated, or whether a voice agent would even answer them well. That is what the call audit in week one is for.
MyPain Clinician-supervised conversational AI Web & WhatsApp
Bounded conversation, a person in the path, every exchange traceable end to end.
The same grammar every voice build ships with.
- Person-in-the-path design
- Full conversation traceability
MyPain runs clinician-supervised conversational AI for pain triage on web and WhatsApp, with a curated safety sandbox bounding what it can say and every exchange traceable end to end. It is a text build rather than a voice one, and every voice build carries the same grammar underneath: the conversation is bounded to what the client approves, a person stays in the path, and every exchange is logged. Read the case
Sometimes a person should just answer.
Four calls we will tell you not to automate, before anyone spends.
- The call is emotional or high-stakes. Complaints, distress, and sensitive decisions need a person: a good design routes them straight through instead of trying to hold them.
- A form or a text chat would serve better. If the customer would rather type or self-serve, voice adds cost and friction, not value.
- The environment is too noisy or the vocabulary too niche. Where speech recognition will struggle, we confirm aggressively and hand off early, or advise against voice entirely.
- You want to hide that it is AI. Pretending an assistant is human breaks trust the moment it slips: if that is the goal, we are the wrong partner.
Voice is harder than chat to get right, so we only recommend it where the phone is genuinely how your customers want to reach you.
What teams ask before the first call.
Will callers know it’s AI?
Yes: it introduces itself honestly. It keeps conversations because it’s fast and always available, not because it pretends.
What happens when someone gets upset or off-script?
Immediate handoff to your team, with the conversation so far attached. You set the handoff rules; we build them in.
Does it work with our phone system?
Voice agents sit on standard telephony: most builds keep your existing numbers.
What about accents and bad lines?
Tested in week three on your real calls, not a demo set: containment is measured before full rollout.
Is this safe for regulated work?
The conversation is bounded to what you approve, a person stays in the path for anything that carries weight, and every exchange is logged. That is the pattern MyPain runs on.
What is voice AI, and what can it do?
Voice AI is software that holds a spoken conversation: it answers an inbound call, works out what the caller wants, and acts on it. OpenKit builds voice AI that handles routine calls end to end: booking and rescheduling appointments, answering common questions, taking details, and passing anything unusual to a person, without a menu tree.
What is the difference between voice AI and conversational AI?
Conversational AI is the broader category: any system that holds a natural conversation, by voice or text. Voice AI is the spoken half of it: real-time speech in and out over a phone line or a web call. OpenKit builds both, and often the same underlying assistant serves a phone line, a website widget, and a messaging channel from one place.
What does OpenKit build voice AI with?
We are builder-neutral and choose tools to fit the job, but a common stack pairs ElevenLabs for natural speech with LiveKit for the real-time call infrastructure, over a language model that understands your business. Whichever components a build uses, the assistant answers on your own numbers and the call logs are handed over with it.
Is voice AI secure and GDPR compliant?
It is built to be. OpenKit holds ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 and designs to operate under UK GDPR: call recordings, transcripts, and customer data are handled to your retention policy, in a UK region where required. Callers are told the call may be recorded, and access to recordings is controlled and logged.
Can voice AI handle appointment booking and rescheduling?
Yes: it is one of the strongest cases. The assistant checks live availability, books, reschedules, and confirms, writing straight into your calendar or booking system. Because it never puts a caller on hold and works around the clock, it catches the bookings that a busy or out-of-hours line would otherwise lose.
What does voice AI cost to build in the UK?
Published UK market ranges put a voice AI build at roughly £25,000 to £60,000, driven up by real-time latency targets, multiple languages, and telephony integration (OpenKit AI development cost guide). Running costs depend on call volume and the speech and model providers. OpenKit scopes each build to an outcome and never publishes its own rate card.
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