Agents that phone people: does the person hear a machine?

17 of the 82 agents in this directory will place a phone call for you, take one from you, or both. 2 of them say, anywhere on their own pages, that the person who picks up is told they are talking to software. 4 say whether the call is recorded. The other rows are blank, and the blanks were read for on 16 September 2026, page by page.

Why this is the capability to read for

A call is the one thing an agent does where the other party is a stranger who agreed to nothing. Your email is yours to hand over. A group chat has people in it who can see the agent was added. A phone call to a restaurant or a carrier's retention line reaches somebody who did not sign up and will not read a privacy policy. They may also be somewhere that recording them without saying so is unlawful. The calls capability page has said since it was written that the questions worth asking are whether the agent identifies itself as software and whether the call is recorded. This is the read.

The seventeen are the listings whose own pages state calls as a capability or a phone line as a way in: Arlo, Boardy, Catch, Duckbill, folk, Homer, Instinct, Lindy, Mae, Martin, Pally, Tomo, Vellum, Wajo and Wis.ai, and since 17 September Persona, whose terms say it may place or take calls at your direction and put the laws on artificial voices and recording on the user, and Tab, a private beta whose policy says a call is recorded only when the feature is configured to and notice or consent requirements are addressed. Eight of them both call and can be called. Each was read on its front page, its privacy policy and its documentation where it has one. Each listing now carries the four rows, with the sentence that answers or the blank.

Who is on the line

Fifteen of the 17 say the agent itself speaks. Wajo's Fo "sits through the hold music and the phone menus"; Vellum's docs promise "an actual phone call, on your behalf, with its own voice"; Homer's example is "call my dentist and book a cleaning, calling now."

One says a person. Duckbill sells the model where the plan is the AI's and the phone call is a human's, and it publishes both: one number for its team and, lower on the same page, a second number that "are our AI assistant", which "says so in its first sentence and asks before continuing." It is the only listing here that runs both kinds of caller and says which number is which.

One says nothing. Instinct's front page says you can text or call it and that it is trained to use a phone. The Concierge service its founder announced on 16 September, for calls and hard bookings, is described as white-glove without a word on whether the glove has a hand in it. The row is blank until a page says.

Whose number

7 of the seventeen publish that the call comes from a number of the agent's own, which decides what the person on the other end sees on their screen. Wajo puts "its own number" on the front page. Pally gives the agent a dedicated number on its top plan and says outbound calls come from it, "always with your go-ahead", with Twilio carrying the audio. Wis.ai's front page gives the agent "a voice, a number and an email address." Duckbill publishes the two numbers themselves. The other ten say nothing about the caller ID, which for a product that phones strangers is the first thing the stranger learns.

Does the person hear a machine

Two of 17 say so.

Arlo's privacy policy is the fullest answer in the set, and nothing else here comes close. "On phone and voice calls, Arlo tells you it is an AI at the start of the call," and, for the other party, "On calls where Arlo speaks, it also tells people up front that they are talking to an AI voice."

The same section names its recording vendor and says some jurisdictions "require everyone on a call or in a meeting to agree before it is recorded". It puts the responsibility for that consent on the user who invited Arlo in, and says no voiceprint is built or stored.

Duckbill answers it from the other side of the line. Its page is addressed to the business that was called: who called you, why, what would help, how to reach the person again. The sentence about its assistant saying what it is comes on the same page. No other listing has a page for the called party at all.

The other fifteen are silent, and silence is the finding, because this is the one row where a document exists to say what is expected.

The Federal Communications Commission's declaratory ruling of February 2024 says calls made with AI-generated voices are "artificial" voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. California's Bolstering Online Transparency Act, in force since 2019, makes it unlawful to use a bot to communicate with a person in the state while intending to mislead them about its artificial identity, in order to sell them something. What either says about an assistant booking a table is not this site's call; what the seventeen say about it is two sentences, on two products.

Is the call recorded

Four say. Arlo records and announces it before it does. Lindy's calls are the meetings it joins, and recording is the pitch: "Every call recorded, transcribed, and filed into folders anyone can question." Wajo's policy lists "recordings of the call, call transcripts, summaries, and the outcome of the Agent Action" among what it collects, and names voice recording and transcription vendors as a category. Pally says the opposite, in three words: "Calls are never recorded." The same policy lists call transcripts among the data it retains while your account is open. Both sentences are on its row; a transcript of a call that was never recorded is a question for Pally, not for this site.

Thirteen say nothing. folk is the honest edge case: it calls only you, at your own verified number, "never anyone else's," so there is no stranger to tell and no third party to record, and its policy says the audio is transcribed. Martin's and Lindy's policies list call recordings as a category of personal information, in the California table every policy carries, which is not a statement about whether this product records this call.

What the blanks mean

A blank on these rows is a company that phones people on its customers' behalf and has published nothing about what those people are told. It says nothing about whether the agent announces itself on the call; Boardy's whole product is a call with an AI and nobody who takes one is confused about that. It is evidence of what was not thought worth writing down, on the day it was read, and the policies wall already counts the wider version of the same silence: 11 of the readable policies say anything about the people an agent contacts on your behalf.

What is not known

Whether any of the fifteen silent products in fact identifies itself on a call, which only a call would show and no listing here has been called for it. What Concierge is. Which of the seven that publish a number use a number that is really theirs and which are on a shared pool, a question the carriers piece asks of the text side, where five front pages change number between loads. And what the agent does when the person on the line asks "are you a person": a scripted answer, a refusal, or a lie, none of which any page describes.

Since this was published

On 17 September three accounts of Muse placing calls were read and filed, none of them from a page. Two users report a beta notification that their Muse can now call through two named voice agents, and one had it phone contractors and follow up by email. The third is a Meta employee's: his Muse called Xfinity, got through the phone tree, hit a verification text it could not read and patched him into the call live, and the representative, in his words, had no idea it was an agent. Muse is not among the 17 because its pages say nothing about calls; when they do, it joins the table with whatever they say, and that account is the first description on this site of a person on the other end of an agent's call not being told.

What to watch

Whether a third product writes the sentence Arlo wrote, which would suggest the row is becoming a norm rather than one company's policy. Whether a fifth says whether it records. Whether Instinct says who is on the line for Concierge when the rollout widens, which turns the one blank caller row into a sentence. And the day somebody posts a recording of an agent being asked if it is a person, which is the sighting this piece cannot yet cite.