AI that calls businesses for quotes, prices and availability

#ai #agents #api #tutorial

A lot of prices are still only available by phone: a plumber's call-out fee, a caterer's per-head rate, whether the tire shop has your size today. An AI agent can make those calls for you. PlaceCall is an API and MCP server that phones US businesses, asks your question and returns the answer with a transcript.

Write the brief like you'd brief a person

The voice agent reads only the brief. Put the whole job in it: what to ask, who it's for, dates, quantities, a callback number, and how to wrap up.

{
  "target_phone": "+1XXXXXXXXXX",
  "brief": "Ask for a quote to replace a 40-gallon gas water heater in a single-family home in Oakland this week. Get the total price with installation, the earliest available date, and whether removal of the old unit is included. Don't book anything.",
  "language": "en"
}

Send it to POST https://api.voygr.tech/calls with your key in X-API-Key and an Idempotency-Key header, so a retry can't dial twice. The call is queued and you get a call_id back. Poll GET /calls/{call_id} until the status is completed, failed or cancelled, then read result, outcome_summary and transcript_full.

Don't have a number? Describe the place

POST /v1/places/suggest with a request like "a catering company in Austin for 40 people on Saturday" returns up to six US businesses, each with a phone number and a ready call brief. Pass the suggestion to POST /calls.

When the business asks something back

"Is it a tankless or a tank?" The agent doesn't guess. It raises an ask_user event on GET /calls/{call_id}/events (or your webhook), and you answer with POST /calls/{call_id}/answer while the call is still running.

From Claude Code or ChatGPT

The MCP server at https://api.voygr.tech/mcp has four tools: suggest_places, place_call, get_call_result and answer_question. In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add voygr-tech/placecall
/plugin install placecall@placecall

Then ask: "Get quotes from three plumbers in Oakland for replacing a water heater." PlaceCall is also in the OpenAI plugin directory and works as a claude.ai connector.

What it costs

A call that gets something (an answer, a refusal or a booking) is 10 credits. A call that gets nothing is free, and so are no answer, voicemail and hang-ups. The first 250 calls are free.

Limits

US numbers only, and not businesses in Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana or Nebraska. By default, every call opens with a short notice that an AI assistant is calling on a recorded line. Some businesses hang up on that: in our San Francisco experiment, 1 in 3 kept talking. A short intro and one clear question get the most answers.

Docs and source: github.com/voygr-tech/placecall.

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