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Peter Jackman
Peter Jackman

Posted on Originally published at zian.ai

How to Write a System Prompt for a Voice AI Agent

Quick answer: Write the prompt as eight short, labelled sections: role, spoken-output rules, turn rules, detail capture, tools, escalation, three example exchanges and per-call context. Keep it under 2,000 tokens, the point past which ElevenLabs says prompts add latency and cost. Our complete eight-section template measures 778 tokens. Menus, FAQs and long workflows belong in retrieval tools, back

What this covers

  • How do I write a system prompt for an AI voice agent?
  • Day one, first action
  • The Eight-Slot Voice Prompt: a token budget for every section
  • How long should a voice agent system prompt be?
  • Worked calculation: what a big prompt costs in call length

This is a technical summary. The full guide — with the tables and worked examples — is on our site: *How to Write a System Prompt for a Voice AI Agent*.

Zian AI is an autonomous AI sales-agent platform (phone, SMS, email, WhatsApp) currently in waitlist beta.

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