9 Best AI Voice Agents of 2026

ElevenLabs Agents takes the company's speech models and wraps them in a full agent builder. You set the voice, language, knowledge base, system prompt and workflow in one place, then deploy the same agent to phone, web, WhatsApp, SMS and email, and ElevenLabs states that context carries across those channels. Guardrails, simulations and automated tests run before an agent reaches customers, and built-in analytics track success rate, CSAT and language use. Pricing is easy to follow: the Free plan includes 15 call minutes, Starter costs $6 a month for 75 minutes, Creator $22 for 275, and every plan charges $0.08 per additional minute. LLM usage is billed separately based on the model you pick, and ElevenLabs adds no telephony fee, though Twilio or a SIP provider bills you for the carrier side. The main limits are concurrency, which runs from 4 calls on Free to 40 on Business, and HIPAA BAAs, which require Enterprise.

Retell AI is built for teams that want control of their phone agents without signing an annual contract. Pay as you go comes with $10 in free credits and 20 concurrent calls, and the full platform is open from day one. Each minute is priced from its parts: $0.055 for Retell's voice infrastructure, $0.015 for Retell, Cartesia or OpenAI voices, plus the LLM you choose, which puts the published range at $0.07 to $0.31 per minute. The builder is a drag-and-drop canvas where you add functions, call transfers, DTMF, SMS and custom logic, and the same agent can take inbound calls, run outbound batch campaigns, sit in a website widget or answer texts. Testing is strong, with simulations and a way to turn real production calls into regression tests, and QA can review up to 100% of calls. Custom MSA and DPA terms, SSO, dedicated servers and 24/7 support sit on the Enterprise plan.

Vapi is the most configurable platform here, and it is aimed squarely at developers. Every agent is assembled from a transcriber, an intelligence model and a voice that you choose from Vapi's catalog, with provider costs passed through at no markup and Vapi charging $0.05 a minute for hosting. Its own calculator shows 1,000 minutes with Deepgram, OpenAI and ElevenLabs landing between $82 and $129 a month. You can start with $5 in free credits, one Vapi phone number and 4 concurrent calls, then add a Core package at $29 a month for 10 concurrent calls, 5 numbers, 30 days of data retention and zero data retention. Pro starts at $999 a month with an uptime SLA and Slack support. Testing, simulation and monitoring are included on every plan. The tradeoffs are setup effort, since you have to make model and telephony choices yourself, and compliance cost, because HIPAA eligibility is a $2,000 monthly add-on.

Bland takes a different route from most platforms here: it runs its own speech recognition, language model and voice instead of stitching together outside vendors, and it argues this keeps call data from leaving its systems. For buyers, that means one per-minute rate with no token charges. Start costs $0.14 a minute with no platform fee and no card, and includes credits plus an inbound number, but it caps you at 10 concurrent calls and 100 calls a day. Build lowers the rate to $0.12 a minute for a $299 monthly fee and lifts limits to 50 concurrent calls and 2,000 calls a day. Transfer time costs less than talk time, and teams that bring their own telephony skip transfer fees. Bland lists SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA with a BAA, ISO 27001 and FedRAMP 20x Class A. Some advanced features, including warm transfers, depend on plan tier, so check the comparison table first.

Cartesia is best known for its Sonic text-to-speech model, and Managed Agents puts its speech models behind a full voice agent. Cartesia handles listening, turn-taking, interruptions, tool calls and knowledge retrieval, while an LLM you choose writes each reply. The pricing is the lowest we found: agent minutes cost $0.03, and each plan includes prepaid agent dollars equal to its price, so Pro at $5 covers about 2 hours and 47 minutes of agent time and Startup at $49 about 27 hours. LLM usage is billed separately, and calls on a Cartesia number add $0.014 a minute. Agents take inbound calls and can dial batches of up to 5,000 numbers through a Cartesia, Twilio or SIP number. You can call an agent from the browser and score the call with metrics you write, and every call keeps a recording, transcript and summary. Integrations are thinner than on the no-code builders above.

Deepgram's Voice Agent API is the most developer-focused entry on this list. Instead of a visual builder, you get one WebSocket that takes audio in and returns audio out, with Deepgram running speech-to-text, LLM orchestration and text-to-speech in between. End-of-turn detection, barge-in handling and function calling live inside the API, and you can change the model, voice or context during a call without stopping it. Automatic fallback keeps an LLM or voice outage from dropping the call, and endpoints run in global, EU, India and Australia regions. Pay as you go starts with $200 in free credit. The Standard rate is $0.075 a minute with Deepgram's managed LLM and voice, falling to $0.050 when you bring both your own LLM and TTS, and Growth customers who prepay for the year get lower rates. Because it is an API, your team builds the app, admin screens and reporting around it.

Synthflow has moved fully upmarket. Its pricing page states that every new deployment starts on an annual enterprise agreement, with no free plan, no trial and no per-minute rate, and the contract is scoped to your call volume, phone system, integrations, security needs and launch support. What you get in return is depth in phone systems: built-in connections for Zoom, Five9, RingCentral, 8x8, Twilio, Telnyx, Vonage and Freshcaller, with Genesys and other SIP carriers connected through an enterprise setup. Agents read and write your CRM, help desk and calendar through 200+ integrations, let callers switch language halfway through, and hand over the full transcript on a warm transfer. Synthflow says agents reply in under half a second and that it handles more than 1M calls a day. BPOs can run it under their own brand. Smaller teams should look elsewhere, since there is no way to try it without a sales call.

PolyAI sells finished voice agents to large consumer brands in hotels, retail, telecom, utilities and healthcare, and it runs them on its own dialog models. The platform is priced per minute through a sales quote, and that price includes proactive improvements, maintenance and 24/7 support, so PolyAI keeps tuning the agent after launch. Agents are built in Dialog Studio, which covers no-code through full code, and the same agent can work across voice, chat and messaging. PolyAI lists data residency in the US, UK, EU and APAC, guardrails and PII redaction, and certifications for SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS and GDPR. Developers can also call its Dialog-RSN-1 model directly at 2 cents per connected minute, billed per second, with 10 concurrent calls included, but that is a model for custom voice stacks rather than a ready agent. Small businesses will find the sales-led process heavy for their needs.

Thoughtly is a voice agent platform aimed at sales and revenue teams rather than support desks. Every plan includes voice, SMS and iMessage, email follow-up and multi-step workflows, with unlimited usage listed across channels and no per-seat or per-channel fees. Agents sync both ways with HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho and other CRMs, pass attribution and UTM data through, and connect to 200+ native integrations and a REST API. They speak 34+ languages, and voice cloning takes a 20-second sample. You can choose GPT, Claude or Gemini as the model, use Cartesia and ElevenLabs stock voices, and bring your own Twilio or Telnyx carrier. Flex supports 10 concurrent calls with email support, Scale adds 100+ concurrent calls, auto-QA, a dedicated CSM and an uptime SLA, and Enterprise adds HIPAA, SSO and dedicated infrastructure. The catch is that no plan has a public price, so every route starts with a sales conversation.