People still phone. A voice line puts your agent on the other end of that call — answering from the same knowledge base your chat widget uses, taking a message when it cannot help, and booking appointments when that is the point of the call.
1. What a voice line is
A phone number provisioned to one of your bots. When someone dials it, the bot answers and holds a spoken conversation in real time. It is not a phone tree and not a voicemail box — it is the same agent, with the same knowledge, talking.
Answers from your knowledge base
Whatever the chat bot knows, the voice bot knows. One corpus, two channels.
Takes messages
When it cannot help, it captures a message — which lands in Leads, tagged to the call.
Books appointments
Where enabled, the caller can book a slot during the call.
2. Tiers, minutes & numbers
Voice is a separate subscription from your Chat.co plan. The tier buys minutes; phone numbers are billed on top.
| Tier | Price / month | Included minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $49 | 200 |
| Growth | $149 | 750 |
| Scale | $349 | 2,000 |
Every phone number is $5 per month, including the first — no tier bundles a number, which keeps the pricing honest for anyone running several lines off one subscription. Minutes beyond your allowance are $0.15 per minute.
Overage is off by default
This is the setting most worth understanding before you launch. With overage disabled — the default — a line enforces a hard cap: as it approaches the limit the caller hears a warning, and at the cap the call ends. Nothing bills beyond your tier.
Enable overage and calls continue past the allowance, metered at the per-minute rate. You can also set your own cap below the included minutes if you want a tighter ceiling than the plan gives you.
Auto-refill sits between the two: when remaining minutes fall below a threshold, a pack is added automatically. Useful when you want continuity without unbounded metering.
3. Setting one up
- 1
Get the bot right first
Voice inherits the bot's knowledge and prompt. If the chat bot answers badly, the voice bot will answer badly out loud — which is considerably worse. Fix it in Test Bot before you provision a number.
- 2
Open Voice → Phone Line
In the bot sidebar, the Voice section. If no line exists yet you get the purchase and provisioning flow.
- 3
Choose a tier and a number
Pick the tier by expected call volume — you can change it later. The number is provisioned to the line.
- 4
Work through Settings before you publish the number
Greeting, voice, timezone and recording all default to something safe but generic. The next section covers what to change.
- 5
Call it yourself
From an outside phone. Listen to the greeting, ask something you know is in the knowledge base, then ask something that is not. Hearing your own bot is the fastest way to find what reads fine but sounds wrong.
4. Settings that matter
Voice → Settings is organised into Inputs, Outputs, Behavior, Booking and Advanced. The controls worth deliberate attention:
| Setting | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Greeting | The first three seconds decide whether the caller engages or asks for a human. Say who you are and what you can do — not "How may I direct your call?" |
| Voice | Listen to the options on a phone speaker, not laptop speakers. They differ more over a phone line than they do in a browser preview. |
| Timezone | Load-bearing for booking. Without it, "tomorrow at three" cannot be resolved, so the booking tool is not offered at all. |
| Recording | Off by default. See section 6 before turning it on. |
5. Appointments
With booking enabled, a caller can schedule during the conversation and the appointment appears under Voice → Appointments.
Timezone is a hard prerequisite
Booking is deliberately withheld until a timezone is configured for the line. Converting a spoken local time into a stored one without knowing the zone produces appointments at the wrong hour — the kind of failure that is silent until someone misses a meeting. Chat.co would rather not offer booking than offer it wrong.
Service addresses
For businesses that travel to the customer, booking can ask for a service address. Three modes: never ask, ask but accept a polite decline, or require it. Salons and restaurants want the first; a mobile repair business wants the third.
6. Recording & consent
Two independent layers, and the distinction is legally significant.
Disclosure — always on
Every caller is told the call involves an automated assistant. This plays regardless of your recording setting and cannot be turned off.
Audio storage — opt-in twice
Audio is saved only when you have enabled recording and the caller has given verbal consent during the call. Both, every time.
7. Reviewing calls
Voice → Phone Line lists call history with duration, outcome and minutes consumed. Opening a call shows what happened in it.
Three things worth looking for in the first week:
- Calls that ended early. Usually the greeting, or a bot that talks too long before letting the caller speak.
- Questions it could not answer. Same fix as chat: add the content.
- Calls rejected for no minutes. A capacity signal, and a reason to revisit the overage decision from section 2.
8. When something is wrong
| Symptom | Most likely cause |
|---|---|
| Calls are rejected outright | Minutes exhausted with overage disabled, or the subscription is past due. Check the line status before anything else. |
| Booking is never offered | No timezone set on the line. The tool is withheld by design until one exists. |
| Answers are right but too long | The prompt is written for reading. Add a voice-specific brevity instruction. |
| The bot does not know something it should | A knowledge problem, not a voice problem. Reproduce it in Test Bot — if it fails there too, fix the knowledge base. |
Anything the bot gets wrong on the phone it will also get wrong in chat. Reproducing in Test Bot first tells you which half of the system to debug, and saves you from tuning voice settings to fix a missing document.