Phone channel — the agent answers calls

Your agent can answer the phone. Someone calls your number, the agent picks up and holds a real spoken conversation — same knowledge, same tools, same guardrails as everywhere else — and the whole call lands in your Inbox as a readable transcript.

This is the channel that pays for itself fastest for a service business: the calls you miss after hours, during a job, or while you're on the other line are the ones that were about to become customers.

You bring your own Twilio account and number; Kelma connects to it. About five minutes.

1. Get your Twilio details

1. Sign in to the Twilio Console. On the dashboard, copy your Account SID (starts with AC…) and Auth Token.
2. Under Phone Numbers → Manage → Active numbers, note the voice-enabled number you want the agent to answer, in +E.164 form (e.g. +35699000000).
3. One-off: go to Voice → Settings and switch on the Predictive and Generative AI/ML Features Addendum. Twilio will refuse to run the voice AI until you accept it.

2. Connect it in Kelma

On your agent's Channels tab, open Phone and paste the Account SID, Auth Token and number. If you already use the same Twilio account for SMS, there's a one-click button to copy those details across.

While you're there you can set:

• Greeting — what the agent says the instant it picks up.
• Language and voice — the accent and voice people hear. ElevenLabs sounds the most natural.
• Transfer to a human — a number the agent puts callers through to when they ask for a person. Leave it blank and the agent takes a message instead, which it will say honestly rather than promising a transfer it can't make.

Press Connect. Kelma checks the credentials with Twilio, so a wrong pair fails immediately rather than at the worst moment.

3. Point Twilio at Kelma

In the Twilio Console → your number → Configure → Voice: under "A call comes in", choose Webhook, paste the URL from the Kelma panel, and set the method to HTTP POST. Save.

Now call your own number. The agent should answer within a couple of seconds.

Good to know

• Callers can interrupt. Talk over the agent and it stops and listens, the way a person would — not an IVR that keeps reading.
• Calls have a time limit. A call wraps up gracefully near the limit rather than cutting out mid-sentence: the agent says it needs to go and invites the caller to ring back.
• Transcripts, not recordings. Kelma stores what was said as text and never keeps the audio, which keeps you clear of call-recording consent rules.
• The agent knows it's on the phone. It answers in short spoken sentences, never reads out a URL unprompted, and asks one question at a time.
• Human takeover works as everywhere else — the transcript is in your inbox, and if you've set a transfer number the agent can hand the live call over.
• Twilio bills the voice minutes to your own account, on top of the usual per-minute rate for the number. Kelma counts the conversation against your monthly message tokens like any other channel.