What an AI phone agent actually is
An AI phone agent is software that holds a spoken conversation over an ordinary phone line. It answers incoming calls and places outgoing ones, understands what the caller says rather than waiting for a keypress, and completes the task the call was for.
The distinction worth holding on to is between the agent and the line. Plenty of products will generate convincing speech; far fewer will do it reliably on an Indian mobile network, from a number that is registered for the kind of call you are making. This page is about the second part, because it is where most deployments actually stall.
In practice a phone agent replaces three things: the IVR menu nobody finishes, the voicemail nobody checks, and the calls your team never gets round to making.
Answering calls you are missing today
Troika Tech agents answer the calls a business is currently missing. Most businesses lose more to unanswered calls than to bad ones. The agent answers on the first ring, at two in the morning as readily as at noon, and never puts anyone in a queue.
- Answers in the caller’s language. It opens in one language and switches if the caller answers in another, which is how most Indian phone conversations actually run.
- Knows why most people ring. Price, availability, location, order status, opening hours. These are the bulk of inbound volume and all of them are answerable without a person.
- Takes the details properly. Name, requirement, callback time, captured as fields in your CRM, not scribbled on a pad.
- Transfers when it should. A live handover to a person, with the transcript attached, so the caller is not asked to start again.
- Tells you about the ones it could not help. Every unresolved call is logged with the reason, which over a month is the cheapest product research you will get.
Calls your team never gets to
On the outbound side a Troika Tech agent works a list no team can. The outbound half is arithmetic. A team of six can make a few hundred calls a day between them. A list of forty thousand is not a staffing problem, it is a different kind of problem.
- New enquiries, within seconds. Triggered by the form rather than by someone opening a spreadsheet the next morning.
- Reminders and confirmations. Appointments, deliveries, payments due. Repetitive, time-bound, and the easiest thing to automate well.
- Databases you stopped calling. The list you already paid for is cheaper than the next one you buy.
- Follow-ups that actually happen. Second and third attempts at different times of day, rather than one ring and a dead record.
Numbers, registration and what Indian rules require
This is the part that decides whether a phone agent can legally run, and it is the step most buyers discover after the agent already works.
- The number has to match the call. Promotional calls originate from a 140-series number, transactional from a 160-series. The wrong series is the usual reason a campaign is cut off mid-flight.
- Registration comes before volume. Entity, sender header and call templates are filed with the operator first. It has a queue in front of it, so it starts on day one, not after the script is signed off.
- DND is scrubbed every time the list changes. Not once at the start of the engagement.
- Calls run inside permitted hours. Anything arriving overnight waits for morning.
- The agent says it is an agent. Disclosure costs a little completion and saves a great deal of goodwill.
When we run it, these are ours. A software licence leaves them with you, worth establishing before the first invoice rather than after the first complaint. The full version is on the AI calling compliance checklist for India.
Nine languages, and switching inside one call
A phone agent that only works in clean English is of limited use on an Indian line, which is why Troika Tech agents are built around the way Indian callers actually speak.
Ours run in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marwadi and English, and will switch mid-sentence when the caller does, which they constantly do. A Mumbai caller opening in Hindi and giving an address in Marathi is normal, not an edge case.
What matters more than the count is whether a language has been tested on real handsets over real networks. Clean studio audio and a call over a patchy connection in a crowded market are different problems. Ask any vendor, including us, to demonstrate in the language your customers actually use, with a real name and a real address in the sentence.
You can hear recordings of live calls on the demo page.
Pricing, and what the rate includes
Troika Tech charges ₹10 to ₹12 a minute, billed per second, with a one-time setup fee. That is a managed rate, not a software licence.
Self-serve platforms advertise less, around ₹3 a minute for the Indic specialists, a little more once telephony and models are added. Those rates are genuine, and they cover the engine only. The call flow, the number registration, the DND scrubbing, the CRM integration and somebody to watch the first hour of a campaign all sit outside them.
The comparison worth making is cost per useful outcome, not cost per minute. A cheaper agent nobody stays on the line for is the more expensive of the two. A fourteen-vendor breakdown on published pricing is at top AI voice agent platforms in India, and our own rates are on AI calling pricing in India.
From brief to live calls in 48 hours
Troika Tech puts an agent on the line in two days, assuming registration is either already in place or started on day one.
- Hours 0–8: the brief. What the calls are for, what a good outcome sounds like, and what the agent does when asked something outside its remit.
- Hours 8–24: script and voice. Written for the phone rather than the page, then read aloud and cut. First drafts are always too long.
- In parallel: the number. Series chosen, templates filed. Started first because it is the step with a queue.
- Hours 24–40: the pilot. A few hundred calls, watched live. The script is almost always changed after this, which is the point of running it.
- Hours 40–48: live. Volume, with connect and drop rates watched daily rather than reported monthly.
Questions about AI phone agents
Yes. It places the call over a normal telephone line, speaks when the person answers, listens to the reply and responds. From the recipient’s side it is an ordinary phone call, which is why disclosing that it is an automated system matters.
An IVR plays a recorded menu and waits for a keypress. A phone agent listens to speech, understands the intent and answers. The practical difference shows up in completion: people abandon menus and stay on conversations.
Yes, inbound calls can be routed to the agent from the number you already publish. Outbound is different, Indian rules require the originating number to match the type of call, so promotional campaigns dial from a 140-series number rather than your landline.
Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marwadi and English, with switching inside a single call. Test the two or three your customers actually use rather than relying on the count.
₹10–12 a minute with per-second billing, plus a one-time setup fee, as a managed service. Self-serve platforms publish lower per-minute rates that exclude telephony, models and the build.
Yes, within TRAI’s rules for commercial communication: the right number series for the call type, DLT registration before volume, DND scrubbing, and calling inside permitted hours. Those obligations sit with whoever runs the campaign.
Yes, live, with the transcript and captured fields passed across so your colleague is not starting from nothing. Ask any vendor to demonstrate exactly what the human receives, a ringing phone with no context is worse than no transfer.
48 hours to a live agent where number registration is in place or started immediately. Registration itself runs on the operator’s timetable.
Getting a Troika Tech phone agent on your line
Troika Tech builds and runs the phone agent, so there is no panel to learn and no telephony to arrange.
The agent answers your inbound line and makes outbound calls in 9+ Indian languages, switching mid-call when the caller does. Troika Tech writes the call flows from your brief, registers the number against the right series, files the DLT templates, scrubs against DND, and keeps the campaign inside permitted hours. Transcripts and captured fields land in your CRM while the enquiry is still warm.
₹10 to ₹12 a minute, billed per second. Live in 48 hours where registration is already in place.
The quickest way to judge it is to hear one. Troika Tech publishes recordings of real calls, in the languages they were made in.