Reference
The jargon, in plain English
We try to explain each term the first time it appears, but here is the full list in one place. No term is explained using another bit of jargon you have not met yet.
- all-in
- The total you actually pay for one minute of conversation once every piece is added up: the platform, the AI, the voice and the phone line.
- API-first
- The platform is built to be controlled by your own code rather than a point-and-click dashboard. Powerful for developers, more work for non-technical teams.
- Batch calling
- Kicking off a whole list of outbound calls at once, rather than dialling one at a time.
- Blind transfer
- Handing the call straight to a human with no briefing, so the caller often has to repeat themselves. The opposite of a warm transfer.
- BYO model
- Bring your own model: you can plug in your own AI model instead of the platform's default.
- BYO voice
- Bring your own voice: you can upload or clone a custom voice instead of being limited to the platform's stock ones.
- Call analytics
- The reports a platform gives you after calls: transcripts, how long calls ran, where people dropped off, and whether the agent met its goal.
- Concurrency
- How many separate calls the platform can handle at the same time.
- Context carryover
- Whether the agent remembers what was said earlier in the call (or in past calls) instead of losing the thread each time the topic changes.
- Credits
- A pre-paid balance you spend as you use the service, like topping up a card.
- CRM integration
- A direct link to your customer-records system (such as HubSpot or Salesforce) so the agent can read and write contact details and call notes automatically.
- IVR / menu tree
- The older 'press 1 for sales' phone menu. Voice agents aim to replace it with free-form conversation, but many still fall back to a menu for some steps.
- Knowledge base (RAG)
- A store of your own documents the agent can look things up in mid-call, so it answers from your content instead of guessing. The technical name is retrieval-augmented generation.
- Language model
- The AI 'brain' that reads what the caller said and works out what to say back.
- latency
- The pause before the agent answers, measured in milliseconds. Lower means it feels more like talking to a real person.
- MCP / tools
- A standard way to let the agent use outside tools mid-call, like a booking system or your CRM. (MCP stands for Model Context Protocol.)
- narration
- Pre-recorded voiceover for videos, audiobooks or adverts, as opposed to a live two-way phone call.
- No-code
- You build the agent by clicking and dragging in a visual editor, with no programming. Faster to start, but usually less flexible than a developer setup.
- Pass-through
- The platform bills you its suppliers' costs directly, with no mark-up added on top.
- per 1,000 characters
- Narration is priced by how much text you turn into speech, not by call time. This is the cost per 1,000 characters, roughly a paragraph and a half.
- Per-utterance billing
- Charging per spoken turn or per chunk of speech rather than per minute. It can work out cheaper for short exchanges and dearer for long ones, so compare against your real call shape.
- Platform / hosting
- What the platform charges to run the agent, before the phone line and the AI usage are added on.
- SIP trunking
- Plugging in your own phone-number supplier instead of using the platform's numbers. Handy if you already run your own phone setup.
- Speech-to-text
- The step that turns what the caller says out loud into text the AI can read.
- Telephony
- The phone line itself: the service that connects the call to a real phone number. Usually billed on top of the platform.
- Text-to-speech
- The step that turns the AI's written reply back into a spoken voice.
- Voice cloning
- Making a synthetic copy of a specific person's voice from a sample, so the agent can speak in that voice. Check you have permission to clone any voice you use.
- Voice models
- The voice engines a platform offers; newer ones usually sound better or run faster. For bring-your-own platforms this counts the outside engines they can route to.
- Warm transfer
- Handing the call to a human with context: the AI briefs the person first, instead of a cold drop where the caller repeats themselves.
- White-label
- You can put your own brand on the product and resell it as if it were yours, with the original supplier hidden from your customers.
Spotted something we explain badly? Tell us and we will fix it. How we turn these into numbers is on the methodology page.