Glossary
Voice-agent terms, defined
The vocabulary behind an AI phone agent that acts over the phone — what each term means, and where to go deeper.
- AI phone agent
- An AI system that handles a business’s phone calls — answering inbound calls and placing outbound calls on the owner’s behalf, on the owner’s okay. Read more →
- Outbound voice agent
- An AI phone agent that initiates calls to third parties to complete owner-assigned tasks. Placing the call is the irreversible act, gated behind the owner’s okay. Read more →
- The commit problem
- Deciding when an AI agent may take an irreversible or intent-disclosing action before it is fully certain — the core of an agent that acts, not the voice. Read more →
- Answering service
- A service that answers inbound business calls and takes messages. An AI phone agent also places outbound calls on the owner’s okay — the part a traditional answering service can’t do.
- Intent disclosure
- When issuing a tool call leaks what an agent is about to do to a third party — a second axis of irreversibility alongside state-reversibility. A read can be costless to undo yet impossible to un-disclose.
- Faithful report-back
- After acting, telling the owner precisely what happened — including what irreversibly happened — in accurate terms, not an optimistic summary.
- Full-duplex voice agent
- A voice system that listens and speaks at the same time, modeling overlap so interruption (barge-in) and backchanneling are native behaviors rather than bolted-on.
Going deeper: read the research notes, or see how Call My Agent works.