The Shift: Callers Expect Human Conversations
When Goodcall (goodcall.com) started, a voice agent that recognized intent and replied within a few seconds was impressive. Now, callers expect something completely different: instant responses, natural tone, and the feeling of talking to a real person.
As CEO Bob Summers put it, customers increasingly assume that if AI is replacing a human, it should behave like one. Meeting that standard required not just smarter models, but much better voices.
This is where Rime enters the picture. Watch the full interview below.
Beyond Human: What Goodcall’s Agents Can Now Do
Even as expectations rise, today’s voice agents are already superhuman in key ways. Goodcall’s systems can:
Parse multiple requests in one sentence
Extract important details with almost no engineering
Remember preferences and use them in real time
A returning caller might hear:
“Hey Lily, you usually book with Julie on Fridays at 2. That slot’s open, want it?”
This level of intelligence only works when the speech, powered by Rime, is fast, expressive, and seamless enough to keep the conversation flowing.
The Breakthrough: Voice That Feels Authentic
One of the biggest lessons Goodcall learned is that voice tone is not cosmetic, it’s core to the experience.
Small businesses consistently asked for the same thing:
“I want the agent to sound like us.”
Not a cloned voice, but something that matches their style, community, and identity. Generic IVR voices weren’t good enough. In fact, Goodcall lost customers because the previous TTS didn’t feel natural enough.
Rime’s ultra-low-latency, expressive speech was the solution. It provided:
More human emotional range
Faster response times
Voices that feel warm and familiar
With Rime, the voice finally matched the intelligence of the agent behind it.
Designing Natural Conversations
Powerful LLMs can overwhelm callers by asking too much at once. Goodcall has been refining conversational flow through extensive A/B testing, focusing on:
How the agent greets
When it pauses
How much emotion it conveys
How it adjusts based on the caller’s tone
Rime’s flexible generation makes this fine-grained tuning possible.
The Result: Enterprise-Level AI
Together, Goodcall and Rime are delivering something the industry long promised but rarely achieved a phone experience that feels personal, fast, and truly helpful.
What once required enterprise budgets is now available to small and mid-sized businesses, letting their callers experience conversations that feel human, without relying on a human on the other end.
The outcome: smoother calls, happier customers, and a new standard for what voice AI can be.
