When a pioneer like OpenAI invites users to create voice agents using its new audio models, it’s clear that voice agents are no longer futuristic.
But for growing businesses, the shift can be confusing.
How do you move beyond scripted bots? Which agent fits your use case? Do you need AI voice bots for customer support, appointment scheduling, or multilingual assistance? And most importantly, how do you ensure you're not overpaying for the best AI voice platforms giving bare-minimum performance?
In this blog post, we break it down for you. We’ll explore the five best AI voice agents in the market, compare their pricing, highlight what makes each unique, and help you find the best fit for your business.
5 best AI voice agents: A quick overview
Before exploring all five AI-powered voice assistants in detail, here’s a quick snapshot of their core strengths, pricing, and whether they’re built for real-time conversations.
Let’s closely examine each of these voice agents.
1. Plivo
Plivo’s AI Voice Agents do more than automate routine tasks. They help you build intelligent, customizable assistants.
You can choose your preferred language model (LLM), text-to-speech (TTS) provider, and language to create voice agents customized to various communication needs.
From healthcare business requirements like sending real-time alerts and notifications or appointment reminders to offering 24/7 customer support, Plivo’s Voice AI for businesses handles varying touchpoints in the customer journey.
Plivo’s key features
- Real-time conversations: Plivo Voice Agents respond instantly due to ultra-low latency of under 30 milliseconds, so your customers don’t need to wait for a human agent and their queries are promptly answered.
- Custom-trained agents: You can personalize voice agents using your own knowledge base, FAQs, or business data to reflect your tone and customer needs.
- Reliable infrastructure: Since the bots are hosted on Plivo’s proven voice platform, these agents benefit from 99.99% uptime and scalable global coverage for high call quality. This makes it one of the best AI call center solutions.
- Plug-and-play integrations: Connecting to AI models and speech providers like OpenAI, Deepgram, and ElevenLabs is easy without a complex setup.
- Flexible use cases: You can use these agents to optimize any customer touchpoint of your customer’s journey, whether it’s making outbound calls, providing customer support, sending reminders, or converting a lead.
Plivo’s pros
- The API is well-documented and easy to use, enabling smooth integration. (Source)
- Plivo’s support team is highly responsive and well-informed. (Source)
- Pricing is competitive and designed to offer strong value for the features provided. (Source)
- Built on a global infrastructure with 99.99% uptime. (Source)
Plivo’s cons
- While functional, the dashboard could benefit from a more user-friendly interface. (Source)
Plivo’s pricing
$0.003 per min per stream
Note: You can save 40% with Plivo as other players charge > = $0.005 per min per stream.
Plivo is suitable for
Scaling businesses looking for a cost-friendly solution to optimize customer interactions and automate lead qualification and conversions through AI-powered voice bots.
2. Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA)
Five9’s virtual agents use conversational AI to automate routine customer interactions, handle support calls, and assist live agents. So, if you want to boost efficiency, lower wait times, and scale support without increasing headcount, Five9 is a go-to option.
Five9’s key features
- Conversational AI: It employs advanced speech recognition and NLP in AI agents to understand and respond to customer inquiries across voice and digital channels.
- Omnichannel support: Five9 provides consistent customer experiences across multiple channels, including voice, chat, SMS, and social media.
- Integration capabilities: You can integrate it with popular CRM systems like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Oracle, and Zendesk to improve agent efficiency.
Five9’s pros
- Reliable platform with geographic failover for uninterrupted service. (Source)
- The outbound dialer is feature-rich, easy to set up, and simple to monitor. (Source)
- List Sync Plus automatically syncs records into the Five9 dialer for simplified list management. (Source)
- Accessible from anywhere, including mobile devices. (Source)
Five9’s cons
- Inconsistent call quality makes conversations difficult to hear. (Source)
- Its interface lacks appeal or text functionality. (Source)
- Initial tool deployment and setup can be challenging. (Source)
Five9’s pricing
$119/month for voice-only
Five9 is suitable for
Enterprises aiming to improve customer support and automate lead qualification.
- Talkdesk
Talkdesk AI-driven call automation is built on the Talkdesk Ascend AI platform so that you can deploy them with a simple natural-language prompt. It also integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) and electronic health records (EHR) systems.
They analyze customer speech in real time with AI-driven speech recognition tools, adapt to nuances such as slang and idioms, and take appropriate actions without complex scripting or extensive training.
Talkdesk’s key features
- Natural language deployment: You can create and deploy AI agents using simple prompts, eliminating the need for coding.
- Real-time speech analysis: It understands and responds to customer conversations dynamically to handle variations in speech and context.
- Multi-language support: You can engage with customers in 59 languages without requiring translation, which lets you reach a global customer base.
Talkdesk’s pros
- Highly customizable through both native features and robust APIs. (Source)
- Flexible tools and customization options for both agent operations and admin management. (Source)
- Status settings like available or busy help control call flow, ensuring agents only receive calls when ready. (Source)
Talkdesk’s cons
- Customization options can make troubleshooting and support responses more challenging. (Source)
- The feature set may lack the depth and stability of specialized AI solutions. (Source)
- Occasional technical issues, including the inability to pause call recordings, may disrupt certain workflows. (Source)
Talkdesk’s pricing
$110/month per user for CX cloud voice services
Talkdesk is suitable for
Enterprises and global businesses needing scalable, multichannel, AI-powered voice automation.
1. Cognigy
Cognigy helps you automate and improve customer and employee interactions. Its flagship product, Cognigy.AI, empowers businesses to create virtual agents that deliver personalized, multilingual, and real-time customer experiences.
Cognigy’s key features
- Multilingual capabilities: It supports over 100 languages with real-time translation, allowing businesses to engage with a global customer base.
- Low-code development: Cognigy.AI offers a user-friendly, low-code interface, making it accessible for technical and non-technical users to design and deploy conversational agents.
- Real-time agent assistance: The tool provides real-time agent support and features like sentiment analysis, live translation, and automated recommendations, improving agent efficiency.
Cognigy’s pros
- Easy to use, web-based graphical user interface. (Source)
- The platform requires no coding expertise, making it an efficient option. (Source)
- Offers a robust library of out-of-the-box integrations for seamless connectivity with other tools. (Source)
Cognigy’s cons
- Building custom extensions can be difficult for non-technical persons. (Source)
- A few parts of the implementation documentation to implement new features are hard to find. (Source)
- The reporting dashboard is a little outdated. (Source)
Cognigy’s pricing
Custom pricing is available on reaching out to their sales team.
Cognigy is suitable for
Enterprises looking for advanced conversational AI to automate customer service, streamline support processes, and integrate with existing systems.
1. Tabbly.io
Tabbly.io is an AI-powered platform that helps businesses build custom voice agents for sales, support, and lead management without writing a single line of code. With multilingual support and CRM integration, the platform makes it easy for teams to automate conversations, qualify leads, and respond to customer queries in real time.
Tabbly’s key features
- Multilingual voice support: It offers over 50 language voices so businesses can interact with a diverse customer base in their preferred language.
- No-code agent builder: Users can create custom AI voice agents without advanced coding skills by defining prompts, selecting voices, and setting output instructions.
Tabbly’s pros
- Engages customers naturally in over 50 languages
- Handles multilingual communication with regional accent support
- Works across use cases like sales, customer support, hiring, and collections
Tabbly’s cons
As a relatively new platform, businesses with large-scale operations may find scalability to be a concern.
Tabbly’s pricing
$0.08 per minute
$0.06 per minute for large committed volumes
Tabbly is suitable for
Startups and SMBs looking for a quick way to scale communication through voice.
Use cases of AI voice agents
Thinking about using AI phone agents for healthcare, finance, or just better customer service overall? Let’s explore how businesses across industries are already putting them to work.
1. Customer service
With 71% of Gen Z preferring live phone support, businesses can’t afford long wait times or robotic responses.
Verizon tackled this by integrating Google AI voice agents trained on over 15,000 internal documents to assist human reps. This resulted in a 40% increase in sales. (An example of how you can use AI voice assistants for sales too!)
You can do the same (and more) with Plivo’s AI voice agents. Plug in your CRM or knowledge base and your agents will deliver personalized, context-rich conversations that convert.
Alt text: An image showing the Plivo AI voice agent assisting a customer
They can become your customers’ digital shopping assistant recommending products or a financial guide helping them invest wisely.
2. Finance
Finance is among the most highly-regulated industries. That’s why AI voice agents are increasingly being used not just for handling loan applications, eligibility checks, and routine queries but also for improving security.
JPMorgan Chase introduced AI voice assistants in 2024 to help verify callers and flag suspicious transactions, cutting down manual verification time and improving security during inbound calls.
If you’re a growing business without the budget or bandwidth of a bank, Plivo makes it easy to get started. You can build and launch without complex dev cycles and automate everything from loan eligibility flows to fraud detection triggers.
3. Healthcare
Agentic AI is shaping patient care by sending appointment reminders, monitoring patient health, and prescribing treatments.
In 2024, MUSC Health launched “Emily,” an AI voice agent powered by SoundHound’s Amelia to handle appointment scheduling and patient inquiries. It reduced wait times and improved the experience for both patients and staff.
While many AI voice agents can streamline patient care and provider care routines, they may miss out on compliance.
With Plivo, you can easily build voice agents that manage patient scheduling, send follow-ups, and securely access EMR data. Since Plivo supports HIPAA-compliant workflows, you get automation and peace of mind.
It also helps healthcare providers who need specific information. They can simply ask the AI voice agents, ”What medications is this patient taking?”, and the agent retrieves precise and relevant details.
4. Operations and logistics
In logistics, delays, last-minute changes, and miscommunication can disrupt entire workflows and drive up costs.
Take Uber Freight, for example. They use AI-driven platforms to optimize truck routing by factoring in traffic, weather, and road conditions, leading to better delivery times and guaranteed pricing.
AI voice agents can bring similar efficiency to your operations. From automating delivery confirmations and driver check-ins to sharing real-time route updates and notifying customers, voice automation can address the operational hiccups that eat into your margins.
Just pinpoint the friction points before investing in AI voice agents.
5. Travel and tourism
With the AI travel market projected to reach $13.38 billion by 2030, AI voice agents are transforming how customers plan and manage travel.
One of OpenAI’s seventeen use cases includes helping users plan an entire weekend getaway, from booking flights to recommending local experiences. It’s like having a personal travel agent available 24/7.
You can also build voice agents to handle high call volumes, reduce wait times, and provide travelers with instant, personalized support without adding pressure on human agents.
Here’s why Plivo’s AI voice agents stand out on top
Unlike AI agents that answer FAQs, route calls, or perform specific tasks, Plivo's voice AI agents engage, convert, and delight customers across industries.
Think of them as digital coworkers: one handling support tickets, another qualifying leads, and a third nudging customers toward a sale, all at once.
Suppose a lead calls your business asking about loan eligibility; the voice agent checks their details in your CRM, walks them through the application criteria, and even books a callback with a human advisor if needed. You can connect them with your internal systems to move conversations toward specific business outcomes.
Plus, getting started with Plivo AI voice agents is super easy:
- Sign up on Plivo CX.
- Create your AI Agent for Voice, SMS, WhatsApp, Chat, or RCS.
- Plug in your knowledge base (FAQs, product info, support docs).
- Connect your platforms like Shopify, HubSpot, and Salesforce.
- Go live and let the agent start engaging.
As more businesses demand personalized, outcome-driven communication, Plivo represents the future of AI voice agents. Whether your business falls under finance, healthcare, e-commerce, or travel, they will support you at every step of the customer journey.
Contact us to learn how Plivo’s AI voice agents can support your voice automation needs.
