ElevenLabs
the voice agent of every client.
ElevenLabs Agents runs the conversation: speech recognition, the language model, the voice and interruptions. Answerbell creates and updates one agent per client in your ElevenLabs workspace.
01What it costs
ElevenLabs bills your account for Agents call minutes (speech, language model, voice). Plans and per-minute prices: elevenlabs.io/pricing. Answerbell shows each client's minutes and caps one call with Longest call (Costs).
02API key
- In ElevenLabs open Developers → API keys and create a key with Agents (ConvAI) read and write access.
- In Answerbell open Integrations → ElevenLabs API key, paste it and press Test connection.
- EU workspace with data residency: set Voice agent → ElevenLabs region to EU.
The key is write-only: after saving it is never shown again, only replaced or tested.
03What Answerbell creates
When you press Create agent on a client:
- six server tools:
business_info,check_availability,book_appointment,cancel_appointment,take_messageandcaller_history(Callers). Each callshttps://<public URL>/tools/<client id>/<tool>and sends the client's own secret in thex-answerbell-tool-secretheader. A request without the right secret is refused. - one agent named
Answerbell · <business> · <language>using those tools, whose first message is the AI disclosure in the client's language. When transfer or an on-call number is set, the agent also gets ElevenLabs'transfer_to_numbersystem tool (Call handling); the client's Knowledge documents are attached to it (Knowledge base).
Update agent (or saving the client) sends changed hours, services, FAQ and call handling to the same agent. Update N agents on the Clients page does it for every out-of-date agent at once. Rotate tool secret gives the tools a new secret. Remove agent deletes the agent and its tools. Do not edit these agents' prompt or first message in the ElevenLabs dashboard: the next update overwrites them.
04The AI disclosure
Every call starts with a sentence the caller cannot talk over. In English:
Hello, you have reached Demo Plumbing. You are speaking with a virtual assistant; I am an AI. If you would like a person, just say so. How can I help?
The Slovak, Czech, German, Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian versions say the same. The recording notice adds one sentence to the opening; neither it nor the receptionist's name replaces the disclosure. Only the business name changes, and it is limited to letters, digits, spaces and . , & ' -. The sentence cannot be switched off or shortened from the console.
05Voice and model
Voice agent settings apply when an agent is created or updated.
| Setting | Default | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Language model | claude-haiku-4-5 | Any model id ElevenLabs Agents lists (LLM list). ElevenLabs publishes no latency ranking, so measure on real calls; faster models mean shorter silences. |
| Voice model | eleven_flash_v2_5 | ElevenLabs' low-latency model. Test every language you sell with a real call (Languages). |
| Voice id | empty | A voice from your voice library; empty uses the platform default. |
| Longest call | 10 minutes | Caps the cost of one call. |
| Fetch new calls every | 5 minutes | Call log sync interval. |
06Call log
Every few minutes Answerbell reads each agent's finished conversations: start time, length, status, ElevenLabs' summary and the caller's number. Transcripts stay in ElevenLabs; the console loads one when you open a call and records that in the audit log.
07Testing a voice before a real number
Run these in WSL or Git Bash (Windows).
pnpm agent body --lang sk --business "Your Company" # prints the configuration, no network
pnpm agent create # a stand-alone test agent, not linked to a clientpnpm agent create needs ELEVENLABS_API_KEY in .env; you can then call the test agent from the ElevenLabs dashboard.