Glossary
AI Phone Agent & Voice AI Terminology
Hand-written definitions of the technical terms that come up when building AI phone agents. Written by developers who build this software, for developers who use it.
Call Handling & Routing
How calls are received, routed, transferred, and managed between systems and human agents.
Call Flow
A call flow is the sequence of steps and decisions that a phone system takes between the moment a call is answered and the moment it ends — including greetings, routing logic, data collection, transfers, and outcomes.
Warm Transfer
A warm transfer is a call handoff where context about the caller and the conversation is passed to the receiving party before, or at the moment, the caller is connected — so the new agent does not have to start from scratch.
Cold Transfer
A cold transfer (also called a blind transfer) is a call handoff where the caller is routed to a new destination with no context passed along — the receiving party knows nothing about who is calling or why until they pick up and hear it for themselves.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated phone system that interacts with callers through pre-recorded prompts and collects input via keypad tones (DTMF) or, in newer systems, speech recognition — routing the caller, collecting data, or completing transactions without a human agent.
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is the telephony system function that answers incoming calls and routes them to the appropriate agent, queue, or destination based on a set of rules — time of day, caller identity, agent availability, skill matching, or priority — without a human receptionist in the loop.
Conversation Intelligence
Techniques and features that make AI agents understand and respond naturally in voice conversations.
Backchanneling
Backchanneling is the short verbal signals a listener produces during a conversation — sounds like “mhm”, “uh-huh”, “right”, or “okay” — that tell the speaker they are being heard and should continue.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is the classification of text or speech along an emotional axis — typically positive, neutral, or negative — to measure how a caller feels about the conversation, a topic, or a brand, at the sentence level, the turn level, or the whole-call level.
Dialogue Management
Dialogue management is the component of a conversational system that decides what to do next at each turn — what to say, what to ask, when to take an action, and when to end the conversation — based on the state of the conversation so far and the goal the system is trying to accomplish.
Intent Detection
Intent detection is the classification of what a user is trying to accomplish from their utterance — mapping an arbitrary phrase like “I want to change my flight” to a predefined intent like reschedule_booking so a downstream system can act on it.
Observability & Analytics
Measurement, logging, and analysis of call data to improve AI phone agent performance.
Call Logging
Call logging is the process of recording structured metadata about every call that passes through a phone system — who called whom, when, for how long, and with what outcome — without necessarily recording the audio itself.
Call Analytics
Call analytics is the analysis of call data — metadata, transcripts, recordings, and events — to produce aggregate metrics, quality scores, and actionable insights about how a phone operation is performing.
Call Transcription
Call transcription is the conversion of a phone conversation into readable text — either in real time as the conversation happens or as a post-processing step after the call ends — using automatic speech recognition (ASR) to turn audio into words.
Post-Call Analysis
Post-call analysis is the automated processing of a completed phone call — transcript, recording, and metadata — to extract structured information like outcome, topic, sentiment, objections, and agent performance, so the conversation can feed dashboards, CRMs, and quality feedback loops without human review.
AI Phone Agent Operations
Configuration, deployment, and day-to-day operation of production AI phone agents.
Outbound Calling
Outbound calling is when a phone system initiates a call to an external number, rather than receiving one. In AI phone agents, outbound calls are triggered by an API request and routed through the public telephone network to a destination of the developer’s choosing.
Dynamic Variables
Dynamic variables are placeholders in an AI agent’s system prompt that are filled in at call time with per-call data — the caller’s name, a looked-up account balance, a prospect’s company, anything that should change from one call to the next without changing the underlying prompt.
Concurrent Calls
Concurrent calls is the number of phone calls a system is handling simultaneously at a given moment in time — the capacity ceiling that determines how many callers can be connected at once before new calls are rejected, queued, or sent to overflow.
Call Automation
Call automation is the use of software to perform any part of a phone call workflow without human involvement — from dialing and routing to full end-to-end conversations handled by AI agents. The term covers a wide spectrum from dumb dialers to LLM-driven voice assistants, and the differences matter.
Knowledge Base Integration
Knowledge base integration is the connection between an AI phone agent and a source of structured or unstructured information — product documentation, FAQ articles, policy documents, internal wikis — so the agent can answer caller questions accurately from authoritative sources instead of relying only on what was baked into its training data.
Branded Caller ID
Branded caller ID is a verified display name, logo, and call reason that appears on a recipient’s phone when a business calls — replacing an unrecognised number with a trusted identity so callers know who is calling and why before they decide to answer.
AI Dialer
An AI dialer is an outbound calling system that uses artificial intelligence to decide who to call, when to call, and how to handle the conversation once the call connects — replacing or extending the predictive-dialer technology that has powered outbound call centers since the 1990s.