Telephony is the layer that connects an actual phone call to the AI pipeline. It is unglamorous, easy to underestimate, and impossible to skip if you are running a real voice product. Get it wrong and the AI never even gets a chance to be smart.
What telephony actually does
- Provisions and owns the phone numbers customers call into or get called from.
- Routes inbound calls to the right destination based on the dialed number.
- Places outbound calls when an agent or a batch run says so.
- Carries audio between the customer's phone and the pipeline with low latency.
- Handles transfers to a human when the agent decides to hand off.
What we wire up
- Vobiz — primary telephony provider for inbound and outbound, with workspace-scoped numbers.
- Exotel-ready and Twilio-ready — outbound placement aligned to the same call orchestration layer.
Why number routing is more work than it looks
A workspace can own several numbers — one for renewals, one for support, one for after-hours. Each number should route to a specific agent with its own knowledge, its own escalation rules, and its own working-hours behaviour. The platform layer that maps numbers to agents has to be deterministic; otherwise customers reach the wrong agent and your CSAT tanks for reasons your support team cannot trace.
Transfers are where privacy lives
When an agent transfers to a human, the recording should stop. Not pause-but-still-listen — actually stop. Anything else is a privacy mistake waiting to happen. Vocily AI ends recording the moment a call goes to a teammate, and the pre-transfer transcript is the only thing that lives on the execution record.