Help › Phone and voice

Choosing your receptionist's voice

Pick the voice callers hear, preview it, and choose another voice provider such as Google, Amazon Polly or Azure.

You choose how your receptionist sounds on the phone. Most businesses pick a voice once in the setup guide and leave it. If you want something different, the Phone voice tile in Settings lets you use another voice provider.

Two kinds of call

Which voices you can use depends on how a call is answered:

• Live calls are the normal kind on Twilio. Callers talk naturally and can interrupt. Twilio does the speaking, so only voices Twilio offers can be used: ElevenLabs, Google and Amazon.
• Turn-by-turn calls are used when patient records are switched on for your business, when CallsCovered has set your line to answer this way, and on phone providers other than Twilio. The caller speaks, then hears the reply. Any voice provider in the list works here, using your own key.

If you're not sure which you have: on Twilio without patient records, your calls are usually live. Ask hello@callscovered.ai if you want to check.

Picking a voice in the setup guide

The Choose (your receptionist)'s voice step plays a set of British voices. Filter by All, Female or Male, click one to hear it, and click Next to keep it. Callers hear it on the phone, where it sounds a touch softer than on your computer.

This is the voice used on live calls, and it needs no key of your own. To change it later, go to Settings, then Setup guide, then Open the setup guide.

The Phone voice tile

Go to Settings and open Phone voice. The heading shows "Callers hear" and the voice they hear now. Below it are three options, each with a sample to play and what it costs: ElevenLabs (recommended), the Standard voice, and Another voice provider. Choosing your phone provider and voice covers the first two.

For Google, Amazon Polly, Azure Speech, Cartesia or Deepgram, click Choose a provider under Another voice provider, then choose from Voice provider. All voices takes you back to the three options.

Google and Amazon on live calls: Twilio speaks these voices itself, so you don't need a key. Add your own key if you want to hear previews in the dashboard, and to have turn-by-turn calls use your own account too. On phone providers other than Twilio, these voices need your key.

Azure, Cartesia and Deepgram only speak on turn-by-turn calls. Live calls keep the voice you chose in the setup guide, and the tile says so.

Setting it up

1. Choose the provider under Voice provider.
2. Paste your key. For Amazon Polly and Azure Speech, check the region too. The tile suggests one, such as eu-west-2 or uksouth. Write it as your account shows it.
3. Pick a voice. Google, Amazon, Azure and Deepgram show a short list of British voices straight away. For ElevenLabs and Cartesia, click Load voices to list the voices in your own account.
4. Click Preview to hear your phone greeting in that voice.
5. Switch on Answer calls in this voice.
6. Click Save voice.

Saved keys stay hidden. Leave the key box empty to keep what's saved. For ElevenLabs, Load voices saves a new key first, so the list comes from the right account. For the other providers, a key you type is used for the voice list and previews without being saved until you click Save voice.

Previews are limited to 20 an hour. After that you'll see "That's a lot of previews. Try again in a while."

If a voice provider is slow or down

On turn-by-turn calls, if your voice provider is slow or doesn't answer, the standard voice takes over for that reply, so no call goes silent.

Going back

• Use the standard voice in the Phone voice tile switches every call to the standard voice in one click. Your keys stay saved, so you can switch back just as quickly.
• Remove (provider) voice removes that provider's key and voice. Calls go back to the standard voice.
• Switching to ElevenLabs and clicking Save voice removes the other provider's key.
• Changing provider never carries over the last provider's key or voice.

What it costs

With your own key, the voice provider charges your account for what it speaks. The Google and Amazon voices Twilio speaks on live calls are billed by Twilio.

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.