New platform lets businesses build AI phone agents while choosing their own carrier, language model, speech provider and voice — with transparent per-call costs and consent controls built into the software.
-- Phony.ai today announced the launch of its AI phone and voice agent platform, giving businesses a new way to automate inbound calls, rapidly return customer inquiries and deploy AI voice agents without being locked into a closed technology stack.
Phony.ai is designed for businesses where a missed phone call can mean a missed customer. The platform allows organizations to create AI agents that answer calls, respond to customer questions, qualify inquiries, capture information, route callers, perform approved actions and transfer conversations to human employees when appropriate.
Unlike many voice AI platforms, Phony.ai is provider-neutral. Customers can select the telephony carrier, speech-to-text provider, language model and synthetic voice powering each agent.
"Voice is one of the clearest places where AI can perform meaningful work for a business right now," said Nate Nead, CEO of Phony.ai. "But we didn't want to create another closed voice platform where every technology decision is made for the customer and hidden inside a blended per-minute price. Phony.ai gives businesses control of the stack while making AI phone agents much easier to deploy and manage."
A Configurable AI Voice Stack
Phony.ai separates an AI phone call into four configurable technology layers.
Customers can use supported telephony providers such as Telnyx and Twilio or connect a SIP trunk they already operate. Speech recognition can be provided by platforms including Deepgram, Google or Telnyx. Organizations can select large language models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, while voice generation can use providers such as Cartesia, ElevenLabs, Google or OpenAI.
Changing a provider is designed to be a configuration change rather than a migration.
That architecture allows an organization to change models as quality, latency, functionality and pricing evolve rather than rebuilding its phone-agent infrastructure around a different vendor.
"The voice AI market is moving extremely quickly," said Timothy Carter, Chief Revenue Officer of Phony.ai. "The model that performs best today may not be the model a business wants six months from now. The same is true for speech, voices and carriers. We think customers should be able to choose each layer rather than having those decisions permanently bundled together."
From Instructions to a Working Phone Agent
Phony.ai is designed to allow businesses to configure agents using ordinary instructions rather than training or fine-tuning their own AI models.
A company can describe what an agent should do, what it should never do and how common calls should be handled. Businesses can then provide their own knowledge, including website content, documents and frequently used answers, so agents respond using company-specific information.
Agents can be tested before being exposed to and teams can conduct conversations with an agent, review its behavior and test it again.
Each agent can combine its instructions, selected model, voice, phone number, knowledge, permitted actions, business hours and routing behavior into a single configuration.
"Getting an AI voice demo to work is relatively easy. Getting an AI phone agent to reliably represent an actual business is much harder," said Samuel Edwards, Chief Marketing Officer of Phony.ai. "Phony.ai is built around that operational reality. Companies need to be able to teach an agent, test it, see what happened on calls and continuously improve it."
Built Around Real Business Calls
Phony.ai is primarily intended for businesses that already generate inbound customer interest.
An agent can answer an incoming call directly or rapidly return an inquiry generated through a company's own website. It can capture caller information as structured data, answer questions from an organization's knowledge base, route calls, transfer callers to employees and perform approved actions such as appointment-related workflows.
The platform is designed for industries where speed-to-response has a direct impact on revenue, including professional services, legal services, healthcare practices, home services, real estate, automotive, staffing, insurance, logistics and education.
Phony.ai also supports agency environments where multiple customers or business units require separate agents and configurations.
Consent Controls Built Into the Platform
Phony.ai was intentionally designed not to operate as a mass cold-calling platform.
Outbound calls require an established basis for the communication, such as returning an inbound call, responding to a form submitted on the organization's own website or communicating within an existing customer relationship.
The platform does not provide a purchased-list upload or a mode for mass dialing strangers. It also excludes ringless voicemail, political or advocacy calling, debt-collection calling and unauthorized voice cloning.
"Compliance can't just be language buried in a terms-of-service page," said Eric Lamanna, Vice President of Business Development at Phony.ai. "We designed the product so certain controls are enforced by the software itself. If the platform cannot establish an approved basis for a call, it should not simply assume one."
Phony.ai also supports do-not-call screening, account-wide opt-outs, quiet-hour controls, call-level consent records and configurable retention practices. Voice cloning requires authorization from the individual whose voice is being used.
Transparent Voice AI Economics
Phony.ai also takes a different approach to voice AI pricing.
The platform currently prices AI talk time at $0.12 per minute, covering the speech-to-text, language-model and voice layers. Telephony is billed separately at carrier cost rather than hidden inside the AI rate.
Customers can also connect their own supported carrier or SIP infrastructure, giving organizations greater visibility and control over telephone expenses.
Every call generates an itemized record showing the individual cost components associated with that interaction. Call records can also include transcripts, captured information, outcomes and other operational data.
Phony.ai is offered as a module within the ERP.io software suite, with recurring platform access currently priced at $20 per user per month and a 30-day trial.
The Phone as an AI Interface
The broader thesis behind Phony.ai is that voice will become one of the most important interfaces between artificial intelligence and customers.
Businesses already receive high-value inquiries through the phone. AI makes it possible for organizations to respond immediately, operate outside normal business hours and provide a consistent first layer of service without requiring every conversation to begin with a human employee.
"The objective is not to remove people from every phone call," Nead added. "It's to make sure a good opportunity doesn't disappear because nobody answered at 8:30 at night or because a salesperson returned a web inquiry the next morning. The AI can handle the first mile immediately and bring a person into the conversation when a person is actually needed."
About Phony.ai
Phony.ai is a provider-neutral AI phone and voice agent platform for businesses, built on the ERP.io software platform.
The platform enables organizations to create, configure, test and operate AI agents that answer and return calls, respond using company knowledge, capture structured information, perform approved actions and transfer conversations to human employees.
Phony.ai gives customers control over the whole voice AI stack, including telephony, speech recognition, large language models and synthetic voices. The platform emphasizes transparent usage costs, provider flexibility, consent-based outbound communication and software-enforced operational controls.
About DEV.co
DEV.co is a software development and artificial intelligence engineering company that designs, builds and deploys custom software platforms for startups, middle-market businesses and enterprise organizations.
The company provides services spanning artificial intelligence development, custom software engineering, SaaS development, cloud infrastructure, APIs, data engineering, automation and enterprise software integration.
DEV.co provides software engineering and development support for Phony.ai and other AI-native initiatives.
Contact Info:
Name: Samuel Edwards
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Organization: Digital.Marketing
Website: https://digital.marketing
Release ID: 89202940
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