Connecting your AI voice provider
The AI voice that actually talks to your leads runs on your account with a voice provider — you bring the key, and their usage is billed by them to you at their prices. Connect one (or both) under Settings → Integrations & API. Only Owners and Admins can.
Which one should I use?
Both are connectable and both place real calls. At a high level:
- Retell — call events (answered, transferred, ended) arrive live while the call is still happening, and it's the provider our one-click Create from template agent builder writes to. Pick Retell if you'd like the platform to build the agent for you.
- ElevenLabs — very natural-sounding voices, and the calling number is wired up for you: numbers you buy or import on the Phone numbers page are registered into your ElevenLabs workspace automatically. Its results arrive in one report after the call rather than during it, so a couple of things — like whether the buyer actually picked up a transfer — are confirmed a minute later against your own Twilio call records instead of instantly. Agents have to be built by hand in ElevenLabs' dashboard, and the card in-app still carries a Beta label.
You can run some campaigns on one and some on the other — a campaign follows whichever provider its agent belongs to.
Retell setup
- Settings → Integrations & API → AI voice calling (Retell): paste your Retell API key and click Connect. We check it live and list the agents we found.
- Add the agents you want to use — they become selectable in campaigns. Or skip that and let us build one: AI Agents → Create from template creates the agent inside your Retell account with the webhook already set. See Your AI agent.
- If you built the agent by hand in Retell, one paste is required so call events flow back into your stats: in dashboard.retellai.com open the agent → Webhook Settings → paste the webhook address shown on the Retell card into the agent-level Webhook URL field.
If Retell's results ever start failing our security check, the Retell card says so in plain language and tells you what to re-paste — Retell signs those messages with one specific API key, and it has to be that key.
ElevenLabs setup
- Settings → Integrations & API → AI voice calling (ElevenLabs): paste your ElevenLabs API key and click Connect. We validate it and list your agents.
- In ElevenLabs, open Conversational AI → Settings → Post-call webhook, create a webhook pointing at the address we show you, then paste its shared secret back into the field on our card and save. Until that secret is saved, call results from ElevenLabs are ignored — you'd see calls go out and no transcripts, durations, or outcomes come back.
- Get a calling number on the Phone numbers page. An ElevenLabs campaign can only dial from a number registered in your ElevenLabs workspace, and buying or importing there does that registration for you. (This is voice only — it does not need the A2P texting registration that SMS requires.)
- Build your prequalification agent in ElevenLabs' dashboard, then add it on the AI Agents page.
What your agent knows about each call
Whichever provider you use, the agent receives the lead's details for every call so your script can use them: first and last name, state, ZIP, age and coverage amount when you sent them, which attempt this is, the buyer's transfer number, and the whisper line to read to the buyer.
Before you dial at volume
Whichever provider you pick, register your outbound number's caller ID and reputation first — modern phones screen unknown callers and carriers label unfamiliar numbers "Spam Likely". The checklist is in Why phones don't ring.
What you pay
Voice-provider and telephony usage is billed by those vendors directly to you — typically $0.09–0.15 per minute all-in. lead2inbound's own platform fee is separate; see Billing & your platform-fee balance.