Help Center

Testing your agent from the dashboard

You can talk to your own agent straight from the browser, without dialling anything. It's the fastest way to hear whether a settings change actually landed.

Where it is

AI Agent → Behavior, in the right-hand column: the Test Your AI Receptionist card. Click Start Test Call and allow microphone access when your browser asks.

You'll see a live transcript of both sides as you go, and a waveform that moves while the agent is speaking. Works on a desktop or a phone browser — it uses your device's normal microphone, nothing to install.

Test minutes are separate from your plan minutes

Every account gets 15 minutes of test calls a month, flat — the same on Starter, Growth and Scale. It isn't scaled by plan because configuring your agent well isn't a premium feature.

These minutes are tracked in their own pool. They never come out of your included plan minutes, never count toward overage, and never draw on bonus minutes. The card shows how much you have left, and rounds up per call the same way real calls do.

What's real, and what's deliberately switched off

A test call sounds and behaves exactly like a real one — but it must not cause real side-effects, so the tools that would write data or dial a human are switched off at the code level, not just discouraged in the agent's instructions.

	In a test call
The conversation itself	Fully real
Your chosen voice	Fully real
Greeting, tone, business description, advanced instructions	Fully real
Knowledge base search	Fully real — it really looks things up
Your services, business hours and booking rules	Visible to the agent
Your transfer scenarios	Visible to the agent
Actually booking an appointment	Disabled
Saving or updating a contact	Disabled
Firing outbound webhooks	Disabled
Actually dialling a transfer destination	Disabled

The agent can still talk about booking you in or transferring you — it just can't execute either. So you can rehearse the whole conversation, including which transfer scenario it would pick, without anyone's phone ringing or a fake appointment appearing on your calendar.

No real call is placed

A test call runs entirely between your browser and Talkybara. There is no phone line involved at all, which is precisely why a test transfer can't make a real number ring even by accident.

Getting something useful out of it

Ask the awkward questions a real customer would — prices, availability, something your knowledge base should cover.
Check the greeting out loud. A greeting that reads fine takes longer to say than you expect, and a caller is waiting through all of it.
Describe a problem that should match one of your transfer scenarios and see whether the agent picks the right one.
Change one setting at a time, then re-test. It's a tuning loop, not a one-off.

When you're close, make one real call to your own number as well — that's the only way to confirm forwarding, caller ID and your recording disclosure all behave as expected.