AI Agents

AI agents (also called flows) are the reusable instructions behind every HUM call. A good agent gives the AI clear goals, boundaries, fallback behavior, and follow-up structure.

Creating an agent

Go to AI Agents → New agent. The core fields:

• Name — required label shown throughout HUM.
• Kind — inbound (answers calls) or outbound (places calls with task context).
• Greeting — the opening phrase the caller hears.
• Instructions (system prompt) — the agent's primary direction: who it is, what to collect, what it may promise, and when to hand off to a human.
• Voice — pick the voice the agent speaks with.
• Voicemail — whether the agent can capture a voicemail when a transfer fails or after hours.
• Recording announcement — whether the agent announces that the call is recorded.

Writing good instructions

• State the agent's role and company in the first line.
• List the specific facts to collect (name, callback number, reason, urgency).
• Spell out what the agent must NOT do (quote prices, give medical advice, promise callbacks it can't schedule).
• Describe when to transfer and to whom ("billing questions go to the billing line").
• Keep it under a few hundred words — shorter prompts are easier for the AI to follow consistently.

Transfers

Each agent has a transfer map: friendly labels (like "front desk" or "billing") mapped to phone numbers. The agent can ring those targets mid-call, and falls back to voicemail when nobody answers. Agents can also transfer a caller to another AI agent — useful for a main-line agent that hands callers to a specialized sales or support persona without dropping the call.

Business hours

Set a weekly schedule and timezone per agent. After hours, the agent stops offering live transfers and routes callers to voicemail with an after-hours message instead. This is enforced server-side, not just in the prompt.

Tools

Agents can use tools during calls: knowledge lookup, transfers, voicemail, touch-tone (DTMF) navigation, sending an SMS to the caller, and any HTTP tools your organization has added from the Tool Registry. Bind tools per-agent so each agent only has what it needs.

Testing changes safely

Use the built-in test call feature to talk to your agent from the browser before pointing real traffic at it. For bigger changes, duplicate the agent, edit the copy, test it, then re-point the phone number once you're happy.

SMS and event agents

The same agent concept drives SMS conversations (set the agent's channel to SMS — see SMS AI Agents) and event-triggered automations that run when something happens in HUM (e.g. summarize and notify staff after every completed call).