The market for AI voice agents has gotten crowded, and most of them give a good demo. A polished demo is easy to produce: a controlled script, a few rehearsed questions, a clean recording. The problem is that none of that tells you how the agent behaves at 7pm on a Friday when a real customer asks something off-script. That is where the differences live, and it is what you actually need to evaluate.
If you are comparing providers, here are the criteria that matter once an agent is live, and the questions to ask before you commit to one.
Start with accuracy, because nothing else matters if the answers are wrong
The single biggest risk with an AI voice agent is confident wrong answers. An agent that quotes the wrong price, invents a policy, or gives the wrong hours does more damage than a voicemail, because the customer believes it. This is often called hallucination, and it is the first thing you should stress-test.
Do not test it on generic questions. Load it with your real business information and then try to trip it up: ask about edge cases, products you no longer carry, things that are deliberately ambiguous. A strong agent stays accurate or admits it does not know and offers to connect you to a person. A weak one makes something up.
“The results that we have had with SpeakNova are better in terms of less hallucination, or lack thereof totally. Just a bit more accurate and precise than some of the other ones that we tried out.”
Check what it actually connects to
A voice agent that cannot touch your other systems is a glorified answering machine. The value comes from what it does with a call: booking the appointment, logging the lead, sending the follow-up text. That only works if it integrates with the tools you already run.
- Does it book against your live calendar, or only take a message?
- Does it write leads and call summaries straight into your CRM?
- Can it send a follow-up text or email with a link, quote, or confirmation?
- Does it connect to the specific systems you use, or only a short list of popular ones?
Look closely at how it hands off to a human
No agent should handle every call to the end. The ones that matter are the calls it should not handle, and what happens at that moment. A good agent recognises when it is out of its depth, routes the call to the right person, and passes a summary so the customer does not have to repeat themselves. Ask to see the escalation flow, not just the happy path.
Ask who builds it and who supports it after launch
There is a real divide in this market between self-serve platforms, where you build and maintain the agent yourself, and providers who build it for you and stay involved. For most businesses without an in-house AI team, that second model is the difference between an agent that goes live and one that sits half-configured. Ask who does the setup, who tunes it when something is off, and what support looks like three months in.
“We had no trouble in the implementation of our system. The follow-up and the support has been excellent.”
Understand the pricing model before you compare prices
Two agents can have very different sticker prices and very similar real costs, or the reverse. Some charge per minute of call time, some charge a flat monthly rate, and most have a setup or implementation component. Before you compare numbers, make sure you are comparing the same thing: what is included, what counts as usage, and what it costs when call volume spikes.
A short evaluation plan
If you want to compare providers properly, run the same short test on each:
- Give each agent the same set of your real business information.
- Ask the same ten questions, including a few designed to trip it up, and check for accuracy.
- Test one full booking and confirm it actually lands in your calendar.
- Trigger an escalation and see how cleanly it hands off, and what context it passes.
- Ask each provider who builds it, who supports it, and what the all-in monthly cost is at your call volume.