One pool, several channels
The thing that holds your knowledge is the brand — not the chat AI, not the widget, not any individual agent. Everything on Brand → Knowledge is searched, in one pass, by:
- your chat AI, when it answers a visitor in the widget;
- your phone agents, when they answer a call;
- the reply suggestions your team sees in the inbox;
- AI social posting, when it writes a post for you.
You add something once and every one of those can use it. There is nothing to connect up, and no second copy to keep in step.
One commercial note before the detail: answering phone calls needs the Voice AI module, $19 a month. Without it the phone screens do not open at all. The per-minute charge below is on top of that subscription, and phone-number rental plus the one-time number setup fee are billed separately.
A phone agent is a sibling of the chat AI, not a child of it
This is the part that changed, and it is worth being explicit about. A brand can have phone agents and no chat AI whatsoever, and they still know everything the brand knows. The old "Linked VEX" field in the voice agent editor is gone — its Connections tab now holds just Assigned phone numbers and Recording.
If you set up a phone agent before this change and it behaved oddly, here is why. A phone agent with no chat bot behind it used to fail three ways at once, and say nothing about any of them: every knowledge lookup was refused, so it improvised from its persona; only the caller's half of the conversation was saved to the inbox, so the agent's own replies vanished; and privacy masking was skipped, so raw phone numbers and email addresses stayed in the stored transcript. All three are fixed.
The one thing a brand without a chat AI does not get
Scripted workflows and your own API tools are only offered on a call when the brand also has a Vex chat AI. Looking things up in your knowledge and ending the call always work.
Most people never notice, because creating a phone agent on a brand that already has a Vex links that bot behind the scenes. It matters if you deliberately run phone without chat.
There is a second consequence of the same restriction, and it surprises people: calls answered by a brand with no chat AI are saved and billed exactly as normal — transcript, inbox conversation, recording, minutes — but they do not appear in the AI answer-quality figures on Brand → Vex → Reports, because those numbers are attributed per chat bot.
What is not shared: the phone agent's own script
Only knowledge and tools come from the brand. The phone agent's system prompt is its own — it does not inherit the chat AI's Answer instructions, and you write the two separately. If you want the same tone in both places, you have to say so in both places.
What else is different about the phone
- 30 voices and 17 language options — 12 languages, several of them offered in more than one regional variant. Narrower than text chat, because spoken models cover fewer languages than text ones.
- A phone number. Bought under Settings → Organization settings → Phone numbers and assigned to the agent.
- Per-minute billing at $0.12 a minute, rather than per answer — on top of the Voice AI module subscription.
- Calls land in the inbox as transcripts, in the same place as your chat conversations.
- No handing over to a person. A call cannot be transferred, so when the agent finds nothing it simply says so.
Which inbox a call lands in
A call lands in the inbox of the agent's brand. That also decides who on your team can see it, because inbox access is granted per brand.
Privacy masking works differently on calls
Privacy masking is a brand setting, at Brand settings → Advanced. It hides email addresses, phone numbers and card numbers, and one toggle covers both channels — but it does two different jobs:
- In chat it redacts what we send to the AI provider.
- On a call it redacts what we store. The caller's speech has already reached the AI in real time; what masking protects is the saved transcript and the call's messages in your inbox.
It is best-effort, not a guarantee. If the masking service is slow or unavailable the conversation goes through unmasked and nothing records that it happened. It is not encryption, and conversations recorded before you switched it on stay as they were.
Next step
Set up a phone agent from scratch: AI phone — how it works. Or see how chat answers are metered: Vex usage and credits.