Voice Communication

Most human communication happens through voice. Your agent can meet you there—listening when you talk, speaking its responses, and making or taking phone calls with you, your team, or anyone else. This can be a huge time saver, and also make communication feel more natural.

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Voice input using the microphone button

Press the microphone button in the chat to speak instead of type, then press again when you are done. Your speech is transcribed to text and sent to the agent. You can speak in your native language, the agent understands most languages fluently. Typical situations where voice input is useful:

• You speak faster than you type, and want to save time.
• You want to “think out loud” and ramble unstructured thoughts without having to think about how to phrase them.
• You are on the go, taking a walk or sitting in a car, and don’t want to type.
• You are discussing something with your colleague, and want the agent to record it so it can summarize the key points, or offer feedback.
• You have just finished a meeting. Press the mic button, hand the phone around to the other participants and ask them to share their thoughts and insights after the meeting. Then ask the agent to send a summary to everyone.

You can see and edit the transcription before you send it. This is useful because:

• You can edit your message or complement your message with info that is more easily typed or copy/pasted, for example a URL or email address.
• You can click the mic button again to add more to your message before sending.
• You can attach files or images to your message before sending.

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Text-to-speech using the speak button

Hover over a chat message, and click the “speak” button to have it read aloud. This is useful if you prefer to listen rather than read, for example because you are taking a walk or making coffee or having lunch. Your agent can also generate voiceovers and embed them in emails, documents, and messages—useful for content that people consume on the go. See Multi-channel communication for details.

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Walk & Talk mode

Walk & Talk mode is a mostly hands-free variant of the chat, optimized for situations where you want to look at your phone as little as possible—like walking, driving, or having lunch. To activate it, press “Walk & Talk” below the chat input. The flow is:

1. Press the mic button to start speaking. Press again when done.
2. Your speech gets transcribed, the agent generates a response, and it’s automatically converted to speech.
3. Press the play button to hear the response.

You can seamlessly switch between normal chat and Walk & Talk mode without losing context.

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Why not real-time voice chat?

Many AI products offer real-time voice conversation, and Abundly does it too via the phone call capabilities (described below). But at the moment, real-time voice chat comes with tradeoffs. Here are some typical problems you may have encountered when using real-time voice chat in other platforms:

• Interruptions — pause to think or catch your breath, and the AI assumes you’re done and starts responding
• No control over playback — you can’t easily pause, rewind, or re-read what the AI said
• Audio-only — you can’t glance at a message, copy a link, or switch to typing without losing context
• Reduced intelligence — real-time voice models prioritize speed over capability, so they are more likely to make mistakes or hallucinate.

Walk & Talk mode avoids these limitations. You get the agent’s full intelligence and capabilities—the same as text chat—with the convenience of voice. The tradeoff is a few seconds of wait time while your message is transcribed and the response is generated.

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Phone calls (beta)

Everyone has a phone. That makes phone calls a universal interface—anyone can talk to your agent just by calling, and your agent can call anyone. No apps to install, no accounts to create. Your agent can make outbound calls (to you, your team, or external contacts) and receive inbound calls from anyone with the phone number.

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Current limitations

Phone calls use real-time voice models, which have the same tradeoffs described above. Most importantly, reduced intelligence compared to text-based interaction. This means:

• Simple queries work well — “Can you summarize the orders you processed today?” or “What’s on my calendar tomorrow?”
• Complex tasks may fail — Multi-step problems involving several tool calls are more likely to produce mistakes or hallucinations

Phone calls are also currently independent from the chat—there’s no simple way to access call transcripts in the conversation history.

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Workaround: the receptionist pattern

For complex requests, treat phone calls like a receptionist: capture the problem, confirm it with the caller, then solve it after the call. In the platform, when a call ends, the agent receives a “phone call ended” trigger with the full transcript. This lets the agent process the request using its full capabilities—not the speed-optimized real-time model. In practice, this means instructing your agent to say things like: “Got it, I’ll look into that and get back to you later.” The caller experiences one agent, but the heavy lifting happens after the call with the agent’s full intelligence.

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Example instructions

• “When someone calls about a technical issue, interview them to understand the problem, confirm it, then say you’ll follow up. After the call, send me an email summary and add a ticket to Notion.”
• “If a photographer calls to swap shifts, capture the details and confirm. After the call, update the schedule and text them a confirmation.”
• “Every monday morning, call all customers who signed up within the last week (and opt-in on receiving calls). Interview them about their first impressions (see the guide document for details). After the call, save the transcript in our customer interview database.”

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Configuration

Once you have enabled the Make Phone Call and Receive Phone Call capabilities, you can configure them. This gives you better control over the agent’s behavior during phone calls.

• Capabilities enabled: You can choose to disable all other capabilities for the agent while it is making a phone call. This is useful for safety reasons, or to reduce the risk of the agent being distracted by tools when it doesn’t need them.
• Custom instructions: You can configure custom instructions for phone conversations. These will replace the agent’s normal instructions. This is useful if your agent’s normal instructions contain a bunch of information that is not relevant to the phone call, which may potentially confuse the agent.
• Whitelist: You can configure a whitelist of phone numbers that the agent is allowed to call.
• Approval: You can configure whether the agent needs user approval to make or receive calls.

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