Twilio, one of the biggest phone-call platforms, launched a feature called Agent Connect: it wires OpenAI's new voice model directly into ordinary phone lines. Until now, putting a voice AI assistant on a phone number meant building your own "conversation engine" — figuring out when someone finished a sentence, when they cut in, when they just paused to think. Now the phone platform handles that itself.

What it costs

$0.05 a minute of conversation. 500 minutes of calls a month comes out to roughly $25 — a number you can run straight through a calculator.

What it changes for small business

The phone is still the channel people reach for first: calling is simpler than figuring out a bot in a messenger app. Until now, a voice AI assistant on your own number was mostly something only large companies could afford — it took a dedicated speech-recognition build. That bar just dropped: wiring up a voice assistant to a line is now about as easy as setting up an answering machine, except this "answering machine" understands the question and gives a real answer.

After text, voice is the next natural channel for a digital employee. The simpler it gets technically, the faster it reaches small businesses — not just large ones.

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