AI voice calls

Nudge places real phone calls through AI voice agents. The agent has an actual conversation in the lead’s language, asks your qualification questions, and the outcome routes the next step.

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Agents and numbers

An agent is a configured voice, script and language, and its phone setup has two sides, shown as two columns in the agents list: the inbound number — the number a caller dials to reach this agent — and its outbound numbers, the pool it calls out from. The outbound pool is ordered: for each contact, a number in the contact’s own country is dialled first; otherwise the pool’s order decides, and a number is never used for a country it isn’t allowed to call — so a contact with no local line goes out on whichever of your lines may call their country. Each agent also has its own calling hours. Each contact owner gets a default calling agent, so “call this lead” always knows which voice and which number to use.

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Editing an agent

Click an agent’s name to open its page. Everything the agent is lives there:

• Prompt and opening line — what the agent says and how it behaves. Anything in {{double braces}} is a placeholder that gets filled per call; it shows as a blue chip so you can see at a glance what the agent will know.
• Voice — swap it any time, with a preview button to hear it first.
• Voicemail — what the agent does when it reaches an answering machine instead of a person.
• Variables — the answers this agent collects, grouped by when they’re captured.

One Publish button covers all of it, and it takes effect on the agent’s very next call. Nothing saves as you type: a half-finished edit would otherwise go live mid-sentence. While you have unsaved work the page says so and offers Discard changes. Leaving the page is safe. Your unfinished edits stay in this browser, so you can go and look something up and come back to them. They are yours alone until you publish — a colleague opening the agent sees the version that’s live, not your draft. Discard changes is the one deliberate way to throw work away. Use the search box at the top to find your way around a long prompt. It highlights matches in the text and filters the variable list, and tells you how many variables it’s hiding so a filtered list never looks like a short one.

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When nobody picks up

Turn Voicemail on and the agent listens for an answering machine during the first three minutes of a call. Then pick what it should do:

• Hang up — the agent ends the call without speaking. This is where the toggle starts, because it needs nothing written.
• Leave a message — the agent speaks, then hangs up.

A message can be written two ways. Exact words are spoken as you wrote them. Instructions describe the message and let the agent word it itself. Either can use {{placeholders}}, so a voicemail can greet someone by name. Exact words is the safer default: a voicemail is one shot, with nobody on the other end to correct a phrasing you didn’t intend. You can’t publish an empty message — an agent that answers the machine and says nothing leaves a recording of silence, which is worse than hanging up. Pick Hang up instead if that’s what you want.

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What the agent collects

Each variable has a name, a description telling the agent what to capture, and a type: text, number, yes/no, or a list of choices. A list needs at least one choice before you can publish. When a variable is captured is decided by which section you add it to, and each section has its own + Add variable:

• During the call — captured the moment the caller says it, so it survives even if the call drops. For anything expensive to mishear, like a callback time or a budget, open the type dropdown and turn on Caller confirms first.
• After the call — read out of the call analysis once the call ends. This is right for most answers.
• Before the call — not captured at all. These are the fallback values the agent starts with when a call carries nothing better, so the script still reads naturally. If your opening line says “Hello ” and a contact has no first name on file, a default of there keeps the agent from opening with an awkward pause.

To move an existing variable between During and After, remove it and add it again in the section you want. Per-contact values always beat the defaults. Nudge sends the contact’s real name and number with every call, so the default only fills a genuine gap. In a standalone workspace, your fields can be the questions. Go to Workspace setup, set a field’s Filled by to Voice agent, then use Seed from contact fields on the agent page to fill the variable rows from those fields. Review them, then publish. Answers land on the contact’s own fields, ready to use in trigger conditions and message variables like any other field. Two things worth knowing:

• Fields left as Staff are off-limits to the agent even if it heard an answer. A voicemail still returns a full set of guesses, and those must not overwrite what a person typed.
• An answer with no matching field still lands, namespaced, so you can use it in trigger conditions.

In HubSpot mode it works the other way round: you declare the variables on the agent, and Nudge mirrors them into a read-only list under Workspace setup so you can label them and use them in conditions.

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Placing calls

Calls happen two ways:

• Automated: a trigger’s call action, for example “new lead in state Contacted: call within business hours”. Call timing clamps to the agent’s calling hours.
• Manual: the Place call button on a contact page or inbox thread. The dialog pre-selects the owner’s default agent and number.

To hear an agent yourself, use Test call on the agent page — open it by clicking the agent’s name. It rings a number you type, from that agent’s own number. Real minutes are billed, and it always runs the published version — publish first if you want to hear an edit.

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Outcomes drive the workflow

Every call ends with an outcome: reached, no answer, voicemail, not interested, and so on. A trigger can map outcomes to states, for example call succeeded sets possibility to Qualified, call failed sets No answer, which arms the WhatsApp follow-up trigger. That call, no answer, message, close chain is the canonical Nudge workflow. After each call, the summary, outcome and sentiment land on the contact’s timeline. Repeated no-answers are counted per contact, so a rule like “3 failed attempts: close the file” is one condition, not custom logic.

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Listening back

The contact’s Calls tab shows every call as its own card, newest first — the outcome, the recording ready to play, and the summary are right there without a click. Each card also names the numbers the call was on — which of your lines it went out from, or which one the caller dialled — so a workspace with several numbers can always tell. Details on a card unfolds the answers the agent collected and the full transcript laid out as a conversation. That last one is what you want when a summary reads oddly or an answer came back empty: you can see exactly what was asked and what the person said. Opening a call from Activity lands you on its card with the details already unfolded.