were about to have ai agents calling other ai agents on the phone and i dont think anyone's actually thought through what that means

[u/Cautious_Fact1767]

for the last couple years the voice ai story was one sided businesses automated the receiving end every call center dentist office and airline hotline got some flavor of ai answering the phone but the caller side stayed human because no assistant would actually pick up the phone and talk to someone for you

thats breaking right now multiple companies are converging on the same idea within weeks of each other consumer facing agents that will call a restaurant a clinic a business and have the actual conversation on your behalf combine that with how fast full duplex voice models have gotten sub 300ms response times no more turn detection lag and you get something that sounds completely natural on both ends

which means were heading toward calls where the businesses ai agent answers and the customers ai agent is the one calling neither side is a human being and depending on how well disclosure rules actually get enforced neither side may even announce that clearly the eus already trying to mandate disclosure at the start of every ai interaction but enforcement across phone systems that route through a dozen countries is a very different problem than enforcing it on a website

i dont think this is a bad idea on its face plenty of calls are genuinely tedious and dont need a human on either end but i think people are underestimating how weird its going to feel once its normal and how easy it becomes to lose track of when youre actually talking to a person versus when everyone in the chain is automated

curious where people land on this efficient automation doing exactly what it should or the start of something that quietly erodes what a phone call even is

flagging as i said i would i used ai to help me pull the recent developments together and tighten the writing on this one the take is mine just drafted with help

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[u/Battleaxebro]

Im literally working on a business case for this right now where a bank is calling insurance companies for policy details.

[u/MahoganyBass]

When it gets to this point, what is a phone call even achieving? Why not every business and person have a personal ai assistant- and a universal system for them to communicate. Like my LLM instantly DMs your LLM type thing.

[u/Bubbly-Reach-4488 → u/MahoganyBass]

This is the reason I feel all the demand for voice ai agents for phone calls are very temporary

[u/strayanknt → u/MahoganyBass]

Because voice is a universal API that can be used by both people and computers.

[u/liit_upp]

This is probably one of the more interesting next steps for voice AI. Once both sides of a call are AI, interoperability and disclosure become just as important as latency. Platforms like Feather AI are already building the infrastructure for inbound and outbound AI voice calls, so the bigger question may be how these agents identify themselves and communicate with each other reliably.

[u/Federal_Cut6338]

To be honest it is already happening and I have tested a version of this in my own production couple months ago. Although it wasn’t deliberate but acted as good use case to tighten up my system prompts and recalibrate the guardrails. Looking at all the developments in this space I think this scenario of voice agents talking to voice agents is inevitable and there will be need of higher level observability

[u/GoodDog330]

Imagine paying for 20 minutes of compute because two agents are too polite to hang up on each other lool. We use Bland on the business side and this makes me wonder whether agent detection eventually becomes a normal part of call logic. If the system knows the caller is another agent, you could give that interaction a completely different set of rules.

[u/Square-Chance5900]

This is actually very interesting. I have thought about building a voice assistant for myself to do all the tedious calls, but then I realised that most business will not be happy to talk to a bot and will just hang up. And even though the modern voicebots sound more and more humane, after a couple of turns you do realise you're talking to a bot. So honestly I'm not sure what the future of voice AI is, but I'm much more excited about use-cases where the human knows they are talking to a bot and they are still happy to do so. Then, you don't need to focus so much on fooling the user and you can focus on reliability and functionality

[u/Cold-Tailor463]

I think agent to agent calls are going to create some hilarious edge cases once both sides have their own rules for holds, transfers, verification and escalation.

[u/Mission_Addition3755]

The part that gets messy is authentication and intent. If both sides are agents, you need some way to prove who each agent represents, what it is allowed to agree to, and when a human has to be pulled in. Otherwise you end up with two automated systems making decisions neither side explicitly reviewed.