Build, publish and test an agent

Create an agent

1. Open Skill Agents in the sidebar and click Create agent.
2. Pick a ready-made template, or choose Start from scratch.
3. Give it an Agent name (for example "Front desk"), choose whether it should Answer incoming calls or Make outgoing calls, and describe its goal in a sentence or two.

Your new agent starts as an unpublished draft. Nothing reaches callers until you publish.

Edit it in the Skill Builder

Clicking an agent opens the Skill Builder. Its tabs are:

• Behavior: the agent's goal and how it runs a call, including transfer rules, a safety limit on how long a call can run, and caller memory (whether it remembers people who have called before).
• Voice & tone: the voice (choose Brand default to use the one set for your brand, or a specific voice, including ElevenLabs voices), personality, and optional ambient sounds such as quiet typing while the agent looks something up.
• Knowledge: facts the agent can draw on, such as hours, services, prices and policies.
• Actions: what the agent can do during a call, such as Transfer to a teammate, End the call, Honor opt-out requests, Send a follow-up text, Book an appointment and the Shopify order actions. This is also where you attach a form.
• Advanced: advanced settings and Published versions.
• Improve: weekly suggestions drawn from calls your team rated Needs work.

The Setup checklist beside the tabs shows what's still missing before the agent can take calls.

Save your draft

Click Save draft as you go. Saving never changes live calls. The bar at the top reminds you whether you have unsaved edits or unpublished changes, and which published version calls are using now.

Test your draft

1. Save your draft, then click Test draft.
2. In Call from, choose one of your phone numbers.
3. Enter Your phone number, including the country code (for example +1 for the US or Canada).
4. If the agent uses different voices by region, pick a Caller region to hear what a caller from there would get.
5. Click Call me with this draft and answer your phone.

Test calls use the saved draft, not the live version. You need at least one phone number to place one.

Publish a new version

1. Click Review & publish.
2. Check the Review changes dialog. It lists what changed since the published version and anything blocking publication, with a link to the tab that needs fixing.
3. Click Publish new version.

New calls use the new version straight away. Calls already in progress keep the version they started with. Every publish is kept as a snapshot, so drafts you're still working on never affect live calls.

Go back to an earlier version

If a new version isn't working, open the Advanced tab, find Published versions, and click Revert on the version you want. The one marked Live is what callers get now.

To put the agent on a phone line, see Phone numbers.