Help › Phone and voice

Choosing your phone provider and voice

Who answers your number, how your receptionist sounds, and what each choice costs. You pay the providers directly, with no mark-up from us.

Two choices decide how your receptionist sounds on the phone: the phone provider that carries your calls, and the voice callers hear. You make both in Settings, in the Phone line and Phone voice tiles. Each tile shows what you have now, and opens a panel listing every option with what it costs.

Who you pay

You pay your phone provider and your voice provider directly, on your own account with them. CallsCovered adds nothing to those bills. What we charge for is building, hosting, updating, monitoring and supporting your receptionist.

The prices below are the providers' own published UK prices, checked in November 2026 and rounded to pounds. They change from time to time, so each option in the dashboard links to the provider's price page. "Typical" means a small business taking 100 to 400 minutes of calls a month.

Your phone provider

Open Settings, then Phone line. Each provider shows In use, or a Switch to button that walks you through its keys and number. Keys you save are kept private: the dashboard only ever shows their last four characters.

Twilio is the default. A UK number is about £2.60 a month, calls in are about 1p a minute, and live calls add Twilio's live-call charge of about 5p a minute. Texts are a few pence each.

Turn by turn means the caller speaks, then hears the reply. Some features need Twilio: see Phone providers.

Your voice

Open Settings, then Phone voice. Every voice has a recorded sample: press it to hear it. Playing a sample costs nothing and doesn't use your account.

ElevenLabs (recommended)

Natural, human-sounding voices. Callers trust a voice that sounds like a person, and are more likely to stay on the line and book.

1. Press a voice to hear its sample. The one you pressed last is picked.
2. If your calls are turn by turn, paste your ElevenLabs API key. It's on your ElevenLabs profile page. On live calls the key is optional.
3. Click Use ElevenLabs (or Save voice if ElevenLabs is already in use).

On live calls, Twilio speaks the voice for you, so you don't need an ElevenLabs account. On turn-by-turn calls, your own ElevenLabs plan speaks it, paid to ElevenLabs directly: Starter is $6 (about £4.50) a month for about 160 minutes of speech, Creator is $22 (about £17) for about 600. Typically £4.50 to £17 a month.

If ElevenLabs is ever slow or down on a turn-by-turn call, the standard voice says that reply, so no call goes silent.

Standard voice

Twilio's built-in voice. It's clear, but callers can tell it's a computer. There's nothing to sign up for: Twilio bills the speech with your calls, typically £1 to £4 a month.

Click Use the standard voice. That's all: one click, on every call.

Another voice provider

Google, Amazon Polly, Azure Speech, Cartesia or Deepgram, with your own account there. Click Choose a provider. See Choosing your receptionist's voice for what works on live calls and which keys you need.

Switching back

Switching is one click each way. When you pick the standard voice, your ElevenLabs key and voice stay saved, so Use ElevenLabs puts them straight back. Remove ElevenLabs key deletes the key for good.

Nothing changes until you pick something. If you never open these tiles, calls sound exactly as they did when your receptionist was set up.

Messages you might see

Still stuck? Write to hello@callscovered.ai with your business name and what you were trying to do, and a person will reply.