The voice agent sounds wrong or speaks the wrong language
Accent, language switching, mispronounced names and awkward pauses each have a different fix.
"It sounds wrong" covers several distinct problems, and the fix depends entirely on which one you have. Before diagnosing anything, listen to a recording — a second-hand report of what an agent sounded like is not diagnosable, and thirty seconds of audio usually is.
Steps
Listen to a recording first
On the contact's activity feed. You will hear things no description conveys: the agent talking over the caller, a pause that felt like a dropped line, a name said wrongly.
Check the voice is set for that language
Voice is set per language on the bot. A language with no voice configured will not sound the way you expect.
Check your plan's voice tier
Standard on Starter, human-like on Pro, premium on Growth, ultra-realistic on Scaler. If it sounds robotic and everything is configured correctly, that may simply be the tier.
Check the language is enabled at all
A bot will not switch into a language it has not been allowed to speak. If callers are switching and the agent is not following, this is why.
Fix pronunciation in the instruction
Spelling a brand or place name phonetically in the instruction usually fixes it. This is a practical workaround and it works well enough to be worth doing rather than accepting a mispronounced company name.
Test the things you say every day
Prices, phone numbers, street names, appointment times. These are where pronunciation fails in ways that cost you bookings, and they take two minutes to check.
For long pauses, look at the model
A more capable model that answers more slowly can be a net loss on voice, because a pause on a call reads as the line going dead. Try a smaller, faster one.
Check it worked
Play a recording to somebody who speaks the language natively and ask one question: would you keep listening? That answer is worth more than any setting.
The parts people get wrong
- Nothing downstream of the bot can change how it sounds. Two markets needing two voices in the same language means two bots.
- Listening to three AI calls a week is the highest-return half hour available for improving a voice agent.