alt Hacker NewsNo, there are companies that sell voice activated phone trees, but no one is getting results out of unstructured, arbitrary phone call answering with actions taken by an LLM.
I'm sure there are research demos in big companies, I'm sure some AI bro has done this with the Twilio API, but no one is seriously doing this.
All it takes is one "can you take this to the post office", the simplest, of requests, and you're in a dead end of at best refusal, but more likely role-play.
Agreed that “unstructured arbitrary phone calls + arbitrary actions” is where things go to die.
What does work in production (at least for SMB/customer-support style calls) is making the problem less magical: 1) narrow domain + explicit capabilities (book/reschedule/cancel, take a message, basic FAQs) 2) strict tool whitelist + typed schemas + confirmations for side effects 3) robust out-of-scope detection + graceful handoff (“I can’t do that, but I can X/Y/Z”) 4) real logs + eval/test harnesses so regressions get caught
Once you do that, you can get genuinely useful outcomes without the role-play traps you’re describing.
We’ve been building this at eboo.ai (voice agents for businesses). If you’re curious, happy to share the guardrails/eval setup we’ve found most effective.