In every evaluation we have ever been part of, one question decides it. Not “how natural is the voice”. Not “how many languages”. It is this: what happens when the AI cannot help my customer?
It is the right question. An AI that handles 80% of calls beautifully and abandons the other 20% has not saved you work — it has created a new queue of angry people who now have to explain everything twice.
Why “we transfer to a human” is usually a lie
Ask what the transfer actually does. Very often the honest answer is: it hangs up on your customer and drops a task in a queue. Sometimes it dials a number and hopes. Occasionally it tells the caller a colleague is coming when nobody is.
- The caller is put back at the start, and has to repeat everything to the human.
- The context the AI gathered — the order number, the objection, the reason they called — is lost.
- If nobody answers, the customer has been promised a person who never arrives.
What a real handoff looks like
When our agent needs a person, it rings your colleague's phone, and when they answer they join the same live call. Not a callback. Not a new call. The one the customer is already on.
The agent then introduces them and hands over the reason for the call, so the human starts the conversation already knowing what it is about. Then it steps back. You decide how long the phone rings, because the caller is holding a live line the whole time. And if nobody picks up, the agent takes a callback instead of claiming someone is coming — a small thing that protects your credibility more than any feature on this page.
And somebody is watching
A supervisor can listen to any live call. They can whisper to the AI without the caller hearing a thing, which is how you correct a wobble without taking over. They can take over completely. And they can hand back to the AI mid-conversation when the tricky part is done.
This is what makes an AI phone line safe to put in front of real customers, and it is why we build Agent Teams around handoffs rather than around a single clever agent.
You can build an agent free, hear one live, or see the pricing before you commit to anything.