What happens on a call

The call is an actual phone call

There is no app, no browser tab, no headset. The rep dials from their own phone, over the ordinary phone network, and the audio arrives as a live stream. That constraint drives every decision after it: a phone call has no loading spinner, no “thinking…” indicator, and no second chances. Whatever the system does, it has to do while someone is holding a phone to their ear.

Nothing is transcribed while you talk

The usual way to build a voice AI is a relay: transcribe the speech to text, send the text to a language model, read the reply back with a synthetic voice. Three systems, three delays, and the pauses stack up into that distinctive walkie-talkie rhythm.

This does not do that. Audio goes to a speech-to-speech model and speech comes back. Nothing becomes text in between. Removing the round-trip removes the pause — and it also preserves things text throws away. Tone survives. Hesitation survives. Talking faster because you are nervous survives, and the prospect can react to it, because it is hearing you rather than reading a transcript of you.

It is in character before it says hello

The prospect’s identity travels with the call as it connects, and the system waits for that to arrive before anyone speaks. It sounds like a small detail. It is not: the alternative is a neutral assistant saying “Hello, how can I help you?” and then becoming a character, which tells every rep in the first two seconds that they are talking to software. The first word is already in character.

Interruption is the default, both directions

Talk over it and it stops, because that is what happens on a phone. The harder prospects also cut the rep off when they lose patience. Neither behaviour is a feature that was added; both are consequences of running a live audio stream rather than taking turns.

The prospect is a document, not code

Each prospect is a description written in plain English — the business, the mood, what earns their attention, what ends the call. Editing that description changes who answers the phone. No engineering, no retraining, no redeploy. A company running four prospects from “will hear you out” to “is not going to buy” is running one system with four documents.

What the call leaves behind

While the call runs, the system marks objections as they are raised and stamps each with its offset into the conversation, so the record knows not just that an objection came up but when. At hangup the transcript, the objections, and the timing are written together, and the recording follows shortly after — captured with the two voices on separate channels, so rep and prospect can be told apart later without guesswork.

Grading happens after, and twice

The prospect never breaks character to coach. Grading is a separate job that runs once the call is over, and it runs in two passes because it is answering two different questions.

The first asks what was said: did the rep answer the objections the way this company answers them, hit the pitch stages in order, respect the language rules. That is judged against the company’s own written standards — not a generic sales rubric.

The second asks how it sounded, and needs the audio. A separate transcription pass produces a verbatim record — filler words and all, which normal transcription politely deletes — with a timestamp on every word. From that comes filler words per minute, the longest hesitation, speaking pace, and how many seconds it took to answer each objection. The second pass is the reason the recording matters: none of it can be recovered from text alone.

Graded against a version, not a moving target

Standards change. When a company rewrites an objection answer, the old version is not overwritten — it is superseded, and the new one lands as the next version. Every score records the exact version it was graded against. A call from March keeps the score it earned under March’s standards, and re-grading is a matter of choosing which version to grade against.

What it does not do

English only. No CRM, no calendar, no pipeline. It does not watch a rep’s real calls or listen to real customers. It is a prospect on the phone and a grader afterwards — nothing else, and everything that implies.