Quickstart
By the end of this page your phone will ring, an AI will answer, and you will have had a conversation with it. Everything else in these docs builds on this.
- A Vociply account — sign up free. New accounts include trial minutes, so you can do all of this before paying.
- A phone you can answer, to receive the test call.
- Two or three sentences about your business — what you do, your hours, and roughly what you charge. You will paste these in.
A working AI agent with its own phone number. It answers calls in a voice you chose, follows instructions you wrote, and every call it takes appears in Call History with a recording and a transcript.
Use the Setup Guide, not the long way round
There are two ways to create an agent. Agents → Create Agent is the full builder with every setting exposed — useful later, overwhelming today. The Setup Guide asks only the questions that matter for a first agent and fills in sensible answers for the rest.
Open SidebarSetup Guide. That is the whole quickstart — the steps below are just what each screen is asking you and why.
Nothing you choose now is permanent. Voice, instructions, model and number can all be changed afterwards from Agents → Edit, and the change takes effect on the very next call.
The five steps
Pick a template that is close enough
The Setup Guide opens on a set of starting points — customer support, appointment scheduling, sales and lead qualification, collections, healthcare, or a blank agent. Each one loads a set of instructions written for that job.
Pick the closest one even if it is not exact. Editing a template that is 70% right is much faster than writing from scratch, and you will edit it anyway once you have heard it talk.
Which template for which businessClinic, salon, garage, dentist → Appointment Scheduling. Agency, real estate, insurance, solar → Sales & Lead Qualification. Shop, ISP, utility, SaaS → Customer Support. If none fit, take Sales & Lead Qualification — its structure adapts best.
Name the agent, and choose a voice and language
The name is for you, not the caller — it is how you will find this agent in lists later. Name it after the job it does:
Front desk — main linebeatsAgent 1once you have four of them.Pick a voice from the samples. There are ten, from neutral to warm. There is no wrong answer here and you can swap it in ten seconds later, so do not spend five minutes on it now.
Language matters more. Vociply supports English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Amharic, Mandarin and Hindi. Set it to the language your callers actually open with.
Tell it what to do
This is the box that decides whether your agent is good. The template has filled it with a starting point; replace the generic parts with facts about you.
At minimum, make sure these four things are in there:
- Who it is. “You are the receptionist for Brightsmile Dental in Westlands, Nairobi.”
- What the call is for. “Your job is to book, move or cancel appointments, and answer questions about price and opening hours.”
- The facts it will be asked. Hours, prices, address, parking, what you do and do not offer.
- What to do when it does not know. “If you are unsure, say you will have someone call back, and take their name and number. Never guess a price.”
That last line is the one people skip, and it is the one that prevents an agent confidently inventing a price. Put it in.
Writing instructions has a full structure you can copy, plus the phrasings that reliably work.
Attach a phone number
The agent needs a number before anyone can reach it. You have two options and the Setup Guide offers both:
- Rent one here. Choose a country, search available numbers, buy. It is live immediately and attached to this agent automatically.
- Connect one you already own. If it is in your connected voice account already, pick it from the list.
You can also Skip here and attach a number later from Phone Numbers. The agent still gets created — it just cannot receive calls until it has a number. For the test call below you do not strictly need one, but for anything real you do.
Numbers cost money separately from minutesRenting a number is a small monthly charge on top of your plan, and it varies by country. The price is shown before you confirm. See Phone numbers for what each country costs and which ones need documents.
Deploy
Press Deploy. Vociply creates the agent, provisions it on the voice network and points your number at it. This takes a few seconds.
When it finishes you land on a monitor view showing live calls, total calls and credits used. All zeroes — you have not made a call yet. That is the next step.
Make it call you
The fastest way to hear your agent is to have it phone you, rather than you phoning it. Go to Agents, find the agent you just made, and use its Test Call action. Enter your own mobile number in international format — +254712345678, +2348012345678, +15551234567 — and confirm.
Your phone rings within a few seconds. Answer it and talk to your agent.
Do not test it politely. Interrupt it. Ask something it was not told. Ask for a discount. Go quiet for five seconds. Ask a question in the middle of its sentence. Two minutes of adversarial testing tells you more than twenty minutes of nodding along, and every one of those failures has a fix on this page or the next.
When you hang up, open Call History. Your call is there with a recording and a full transcript of who said what. This is where you will spend most of your tuning time.
Fixing what you just heard
Nearly every first-call complaint falls into one of these five, and each has a one-setting answer.
| What you heard | What to change |
|---|---|
| It talks over me / cuts me off | Raise the wait time in Agents → Edit → Voice. The agent is deciding you have finished speaking too early. See Voice & conversation. |
| Long silence before it replies | Usually the opposite setting, tuned too far. Lower the no-punctuation wait. Also shorten your instructions — a very long prompt costs thinking time on every single turn. |
| It invented a price or a policy | Add the real figure to the instructions, and add an explicit “never guess” line. For anything longer than a paragraph of facts, use a Knowledge Base instead of stuffing the prompt. |
| It rambles | Add a length rule: “Keep every reply to one or two sentences. Ask one question at a time.” Models are verbose unless told not to be. |
| It will not let me reach a human | Add a Transfer Call tool with your real number and tell it when to use it. See Tools. |
Edit, save, and call again. Changes apply to the next call — there is no rebuild or redeploy step. Expect three or four rounds of this before an agent feels right; that is normal and it is quick.
Where to go next
You now have a talking agent. It cannot yet do anything — look at a calendar, find a customer, write to your CRM. That is the next leap, and it is the one that makes the difference.
Understand the five pieces you just used, so the rest of the docs read easily.
Upload your price list or policies so the agent stops guessing.
Give the agent your calendar, CRM or spreadsheet to read and write during a call.
The complete version of what you just built, with real calendar booking.
Common first-day questions
Do I need to keep the browser open for the agent to answer calls?
No. Once deployed, the agent runs on Vociply’s infrastructure. Close your laptop — it keeps answering.
How much did that test call cost me?
Calls are billed per minute against your plan’s included minutes. A two-minute test call uses two minutes. You can see exactly what has been used on Billing, and every call’s duration is on Call History.
Can one agent handle several calls at the same time?
Yes. Agents are not a single phone line — a dozen people can be talking to the same agent simultaneously and each gets its own conversation. This is the main reason people move off an answering service.
Can I use my existing business number?
Yes, in two ways. You can connect a number you already hold in your voice account, or you can keep your current number where it is and forward it to a Vociply number. Forwarding is the fastest and needs no paperwork — Phone numbers covers both.
Will callers know it is an AI?
Most people work it out, and the agents that perform best do not pretend otherwise. Some jurisdictions require you to disclose it. A simple opening line — “Hi, you’re through to Brightsmile’s virtual assistant, how can I help?” — sets expectations and measurably reduces people hanging up. See Consent & calling rules.