Basic voice agents overview

This article describes the features available in Copilot Studio for basic voice interactive voice response (IVR) agents for use in Dynamics 365 Contact Center applications. Basic voice agents are typically built to use classic orchestration.

To begin, get your agent ready for voice services. Learn more in Integrate a voice-enabled agent with Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

Supported voice features

After your agent is ready for voice services, you can configure features for your scenario.

• Collect user input via speech and DTMF:

  • Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) support
  • Silence detection and timeouts
  • Speech recognition improvement

• Control how your agent's voice sounds and how your agent interacts with users:

  • Barge-in
  • Latency message
  • Speech synthesis markup language (SSML)

• Control the call flow by transferring calls or hanging up:

  • Transfer a call to a customer service representative or external phone number
  • Hang up at the end of a conversation

• Authoring capabilities when building a basic voice agent:

  • Build a basic voice agent from a template
  • Turn on basic voice
  • Use voice variables
  • Test your basic voice agent in the test panel

Tips and limitations

The following list mentions limitations and provides tips to help you:

• Channel order: Enable the Telephony channel first and then connect with Dynamics 365. The sequence is for channel reconnection.

• Languages and regions: Review the supported languages and locales. If you need a language that isn't supported yet, or a region-specific variant, contact Microsoft Support.

• DTMF: The Question node supports single-digit and multi-digit DTMF input.

• DTMF only: When DTMF only for voice is enabled, timers such as interdigit timeout for DTMF or silence detection timeout aren't supported.

• Latency message for Action nodes: If you don't configure a latency message or the message is empty, all messages before the Action node are blocked and sent after the action completes. If you use multiple consecutive Action nodes for one topic and hit any unexpected results, add a Message node between the consecutive Action nodes.

• Test chat dial pad: The dial pad for the test panel isn't supported. As a workaround, enter the command /DTMFkey# directly into the chat.

• Multilingual voice-enabled agents: To be able to publish a multilingual voice agent to the Dynamics 365 Contact Center channel, you must select the No authentication authentication option. Learn more in Configure user authentication.

• Customer engagement hub: The only customer engagement channel that supports voice agents is Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The following channels only support chat-based agents:

  • Genesys
  • LivePerson
  • Salesforce
  • ServiceNow

• Generative AI for basic voice agents: Creating and editing topics with Copilot isn't supported for voice-enabled agents. Copilot doesn't create messages for the Speech & DTMF modality, and doesn't configure DTMF mappings.

• Environment release cycle: Basic voice agents are only available in standard environments. They aren't available in early release cycle environments. Learn more in Unable to turn on Optimize for voice.