Voice agents overview

How the voice surface fits together — agents, products, context packs, campaigns and preflight — and what has to be true before a phone actually rings.

Voice Agents is where you build an AI that makes phone calls, decide who it is allowed to call, and read back what happened on every call. It lives under CRMVoice Agents: four tabs in one workspace, and almost every problem people hit comes from not knowing which of the four owns the thing they are looking for.

Before you start

Voice Agents needs the Voice plan feature and the voice permission. Owners have it automatically. On the Base plan the nav item is hidden entirely and a deep link shows a plan notice instead of the workspace.

Agent

Published version

Campaign

Agent + list + window

Preflight

Blocks on any error

The call

Runs your workflow stages

Outcome

Transcript, disposition, handoff

Preflight is the gate people get stuck at — it refuses the campaign rather than dialling and failing.

The Voice Agents roster showing three agents with their model, voice, stage count, call volume and publish status — The Status column is the one to read: an agent with only a draft version cannot be used by a campaign, however complete it looks.

The four tabs

Tab	What lives here
Agents	The agents themselves, and — behind a pill at the top — Products, the offer playbooks an agent may quote
Campaigns	Who gets called, by which agent, from which number, inside which hours
Calls	Every call the workspace has placed, with transcripts and outcomes
Knowledge	The context library and the packs you attach to agents and campaigns

The Settings button in the header takes you to SettingsVoice & Telephony, which holds everything that applies to the whole workspace rather than one agent.

Four things, and what each one is for

People conflate these constantly, so it is worth being blunt about the difference.

An agent version is the caller: who it says it is, how it talks, what it is allowed to do. Versions are numbered and go draft → published → archived.
A product is the offer: FAQs, objections, pricing and claim rules. It is versioned the same way. Product answers stay authoritative — context that is not supported by the product never becomes a claim on the call.
A context pack is a named bundle of approved knowledge the agent may search mid-call. Attached per agent version, and optionally per campaign.
A campaign is the run: the lead list, the caller number, the calling window and the caps.

A campaign pins one published agent version and one published product version. Both of them. That is the most common reason a new campaign cannot be approved.

How a call actually happens

You publish an agent version and a product version

Drafts are invisible to campaigns. Publishing archives whichever version was published before it.

You create a campaign and import leads

The campaign pins the agent, the product, the caller number, the calling window and the caps.

You run preflight

A deterministic server-side check. Errors block; warnings need a typed acknowledgment.

You approve, then start

Approval snapshots the configuration into an immutable version. Preflight re-runs at launch.

The dispatcher dials inside each lead's local calling window

Preflight runs again before every single dial. Dialing is not instant — it proceeds on a dispatcher tick.

Live dialing is armed by Zyan, not by you

The default runtime simulates calls with no telephony egress. Real dialing to the public phone network is gated at the platform level and cannot be switched on from Settings. Until it is armed for your workspace, preflight reports live_calls_disabled and nothing leaves the building. Use Voice Lab, scenario simulation or a saved test number in the meantime, and contact Zyan support about live calling.

What you can do without live calling

Quite a lot, and it is the right order to work in anyway:

Voice Lab — a typed rehearsal against a selected agent version.
Scenario simulation — deterministic, zero egress, no call placed and production suppression untouched.
Live usability test — a real call to a saved test number, when Enable live usability tests is on in Settings → Voice & Telephony and a caller route is ready.

Who can do what

Action	Needs
See the workspace	Voice plan feature plus the `voice` permission
Create or edit an agent, product or campaign	Voice edit permission
Run a preflight	Voice edit permission — viewers see results only after someone else runs one
Activate the emergency stop	Voice edit permission
Connect Twilio or Telnyx	Workspace owner

If the tab says nothing is dialing, believe it

Where the voice functions are not deployed in an environment, the UI says so outright: The voice-agent functions are not deployed in this environment yet. Nothing is dialing. That message is accurate, not a loading state.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Voice Agents is missing from the sidebar	The workspace is on the Base plan, or the `voice` permission is not granted	Check the plan and your permissions with the workspace owner
A new campaign will not offer your agent	No version of it has been published	Open the agent, save the draft, then Publish…
A campaign cannot be approved even though the agent is published	The product version is not published	Publish a product version and re-select it on the campaign
Preflight reports `live_calls_disabled`	The platform voice gates are in their safe default posture	Live dialing is armed at the platform level — contact Zyan support
The tab loads but says nothing is dialing	The voice functions are not deployed in this environment	Nothing you change in the admin will fix it; contact support

In this section

Create your first voice agent

Identity and voice, how it talks, what it may do, and publishing a version.

Writing the call workflow

Turn the call into ordered stages with objectives, budgets and exit criteria.

Build a knowledge base for your agents

Approved sources, context packs, and testing what the agent can retrieve.

Test an agent before it calls anyone

Typed Voice Lab, zero-egress simulation, and a real call to a test number.

Voice campaigns

Who gets called, the calling window and caps, approval and launch.

Preflight check reference

Every code that blocks a campaign, and the exact change that clears it.

Connect Twilio or Telnyx

Bring your own carrier so its numbers become caller IDs.

Reading call records

Transcripts, extracted outcomes, the CRM projection, and opting a number out.

Voice & Telephony settings

The workspace-wide policy every agent and campaign inherits.

Voice agent troubleshooting

Nothing dialing, a campaign that will not approve, leads stuck at pending.

Triggers and steps reference — the Voice call outcome trigger is the handoff out of a finished call
How leads reach Zyan — where the numbers you dial come from
Team and permissions
What to expect