voice ai
Chatbots vs voice agents: which is right?
A practical comparison of text chatbots and AI voice agents for business websites: where each one wins, what they cost to run and which to switch on first.
Read the guideAI voice agent
Let your website be spoken to
Some visitors will never type a question. GetParlix gives them a voice agent right in the widget. It answers from your own material, books appointments and stops itself before saying a number it can't back up.
Listening. No phone call, no app
- Hi, how much is a full colour treatment?
- A full colour is ninety-nine dollars and forty-five cents, and it takes about two hours.
- Can I book that for Thursday?
- Thursday has an opening at 11 am. Shall I put you down for that?
Under the hood
What happens between you speaking and it answering
Four stages, most of them overlapping. The overlap is what makes it feel like a conversation instead of a walkie-talkie.
It hears you
Speech is transcribed as you talk, not after you stop. You can teach it how your product names and local terms are spelled so it stops mishearing them.
It looks things up
While you're still finishing your sentence, it has already started searching your documents for the answer. That head start is most of why it replies quickly.
It checks itself
Before a word is spoken, every price, date and name in the reply is compared against your source material. Anything unsupported is stopped.
It speaks
Audio streams back as it is generated, so the reply begins before the whole sentence exists. Interrupt it and it stops, the way a person would.
The part we care most about
A voice agent that quotes the wrong price is a liability
Text you can re-read. Speech you cannot. So the bar for what gets said out loud has to be higher.
Every reply passes a grounding check before any audio is produced. It pulls the numbers and names out of the draft answer and compares them against the passages retrieved from your documents. If something isn't supported, the reply doesn't go out as written.
Spoken
“A full colour is ninety-nine dollars and forty-five cents, and it takes about two hours.”
Both the price and the duration appear in the uploaded price list.
Blocked
“That's usually around a hundred and twenty, and we can normally fit you in same day.”
Neither figure is in your material. The agent asks or offers to take details instead.
What it does
Everything the voice agent handles
All live today. We spent most of our time on the rough parts of voice, including interruptions, echo and mispronounced product names.
In the browser, not on the phone
The visitor clicks and talks, using their microphone, inside your website. There's no number to ring, no hold music and no app to download.
It won't say a number it can't source
A grounding check sits between the answer and the speaker. If a figure or name isn't in the passages retrieved from your documents, it doesn't get spoken.
You can interrupt it
Start talking and it stops. It also keeps track of how much of its reply you actually heard, so the conversation doesn't get confused about what was said.
It doesn't hear itself
Echo suppression stops the agent's own voice being transcribed as if the caller had spoken, which is what usually makes voice bots interrupt themselves.
Prices spoken like a person
Amounts are read the way people say them. Ninety-nine forty-five is spoken in full rather than rounded to ninety-nine.
Tuned per account
Choose the voice, adjust its stability, similarity and speed, and give the transcriber a list of terms it must get right, including product names, local place names and anything unusual.
2:30 · coming soon
Hear a full voice conversation
An unedited call from first question to confirmed booking, with the live transcript on screen so you can see what it heard and what it said.
- A spoken pricing question answered from an uploaded price list
- Interrupting mid-sentence and it stopping immediately
- The grounding check refusing an unsupported figure
- An appointment booked and confirmed out loud
From the blog
When speaking is the better interface
Compare voice with chat and see what after-hours automation looks like when visitors are ready to act.
guides
How to add an AI chatbot to your website
Exactly where the script tag goes on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow and custom sites, plus what to prepare before you install anything.
Read the guideautomation
After-hours enquiries: your AI solution
How businesses can handle after-hours enquiries, answer common questions and keep more appointment-ready visitors from leaving.
Read the guideFAQ
AI voice agent questions
It's an assistant you talk to out loud instead of typing to. It transcribes what you say, works out an answer and speaks it back quickly enough to feel like a conversation rather than a series of turns.
No. This is important: GetParlix voice runs inside the widget on your website, through the visitor's browser and microphone. There is no phone number, no PSTN or SIP connection, and no call forwarding. If you need your business line answered, this isn't that product.
Fast enough to feel conversational. The main technique is starting the knowledge lookup on the first part of what you say rather than waiting for you to finish, which collapses two round trips into one. Actual timing depends on the visitor's connection.
That's the specific failure we engineered against. Before audio is produced, the reply is checked against the passages retrieved from your documents, and numbers or names that don't appear there are blocked. A voice agent that confidently quotes the wrong price is a liability, not a feature.
Yes. The voice agent uses the same booking logic as the chatbot: real availability from your working hours, slots locked as they're taken, and the time confirmed back to you before anything is written.
A modern browser and a microphone, and to grant microphone permission when asked. Nothing to install.
English is what we support and test. We would not recommend relying on it for a non-English audience yet.
Yes. Voice sessions have a maximum length and a limit on how many can run at once per account, which keeps costs predictable. We'll set those with you.
Hear it answering your customers
Send us your price list and the questions you get asked most. We'll set up a voice agent on your own material and let you talk to it.