AI voice agent platforms are evolving rapidly. While ChatGPT can be a powerful assistant in building voice agents, relying solely on it can sometimes result in outdated or incorrect information.
Following stale information/wrong information can be super frustrating. This article provides some tips on how to use ChatGPT to help build AI voice agents.
Background
The lifecycle of an AI voice agent includes several stages:
- Create
- Test
- Deploy
ChatGPT is most useful during the Create phase, which is often the most complex. This phase involves designing the agent’s behavior, conversation flow, and system integrations.
Core Components of AI Voice Agents:
● Conversation Flow
○ Prompt Writing (supported by all platforms)
○ Conversational Pathways (natively supported by tools like Bland and Retell)
● Function Calling
○ In-call Behavior
○ Post-call Analysis
● Call Transfer
● Settings Configuration (e.g., backchannel setup)
Key Challenges
Several key challenges to build AI voice agents:
● Fragmented Workflows: Stitching together all the components into a cohesive, testable workflow is hard—especially when outputs aren’t deterministic.
● Testing Frustrations: Because AI behavior varies, debugging and testing voice agents can be frustrating. Users may get inconsistent responses, leading to confusion.
● Keeping Up With Changes: Platforms change fast. The biggest pain point is ensuring ChatGPT is referencing the latest API docs and platform updates.
Important Tips
We will walk through how to use ChatGPT to help each step. The critical advance is to always reference official documentation.
Conversation Flow
Two ways to create the convection flow of AI voice agents.
(1) Write prompt
ChatGPT can definitely help write prompts. You can write the high level idea of the conversation flow based on your past call experience. Then you can copy the steps into ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to rewrite the prompt.
After the prompt is done, you can copy inside the AI voice agent.
(2) Conversation flow
The prompt can lead to AI agents not flow specific conversation flow. To mitigate this issue, Bland and Retell released the conversation flow to better control the conversation flow.
As the conversation flow is a new concept, Accessing the most up-to-date documentation is essential to building a functional and reliable AI voice agent. When you build an AI agent, you can put the Bland/Retell latest documentation URL into the ChatGPT. Then you ask ChatGPT to
follow the latest documentation to build the flow or fix any issue.
Function Call
This step includes two sides:
● Voice Agent Setup
● Automation Platform Setup (e.g., N8N)
The best practice is to use curl command to test the automation setup firstly. After you confirm the curl command can work, you can put the automation webhook URL into the voice agent.
You can ask ChatGPT to write a curl command to access the automation. Then you can copy the curl command into the terminal. The reason is that the function call error response is not advanced. But curl can tell you what goes wrong.
Call Transfer
This is usually handled via the platform UI. While it’s more traightforward, ChatGPT can still help explain the steps or troubleshoot issues.
Settings
For features like backchanneling or fallback configurations, you can ask ChatGPT to reference the documentation and walk through setup instructions.
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