Phonely, the leading AI-powered voice agent platform, is taking on the models built by AI’s biggest players with Alma, an LLM built specifically for voice agents to drive conversations forward. Trained on over 10 million real phone conversations instead of text, Alma is designed for the messy reality of voice, like interruptions, background voices and transcription errors, rather than only clean turn-taking. It enables self-improving agents that learn from live call data over time without depending on a frontier lab’s next model. Alma already powers 100% of Phonely’s agent conversations, handling millions of calls a month for hundreds of businesses, and is now available to teams building voice agents.
When customers talk to a voice agent, they can usually tell. LLMs trained for text are the dominant models driving the conversation. So although teams spend countless hours prompting and re-prompting an agent to sound natural, it can still stumble on human conversation staples, like a caller interrupting or changing their mind mid-sentence.
The voice AI model problem persists. For the last few years, frontier labs prioritized making models better at coding, reasoning and long-running tasks. Those same improvements haven’t made their way to voice agents, with many still running on a general-purpose model not designed for the demands of a phone call. An agent-led phone call needs something different. Voice agents need to follow instructions exactly, respond instantly, maintain reliability across long conversations and sound natural on every turn. Models built only for text can struggle to deliver all four.
That matters when approximately $2.7 billion in revenue is transacted over the phone every day across industries, including insurance, legal intake, appointment booking and sales. Every lag, missed rebuttal or unnatural interaction can put revenue at risk.
Alma addresses this need by working with any transcriber and any text-to-speech provider, so teams adopt it inside their existing stack. Because it’s pre-trained to sound like a person, Alma removes most of the prompt engineering teams do today. Even when traffic spikes, its automatic failovers, multi-region routing and priority inference keep response times consistent.
“Every voice agent on the market is running on a model built for something else. We had the phone calls, so we built the model for the calls. It is already answering millions of Phonely calls monthly, and now anyone building in voice can use it,” said Will Bodewes, CEO and co-founder of Phonely.
But Alma’s advantage extends beyond what it can do on a single call. Because Phonely owns the model and operates it across millions of live conversations, it can use those calls to continuously improve how agents perform. Alma identifies where conversations break down and feeds those learnings back into the model, allowing agents to self-improve on real traffic rather than waiting for a frontier lab’s next release. Within Phonely, that process happens automatically for every customer.
Alma delivers sub 185 milliseconds to first token, compared with roughly 500 milliseconds for OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, reducing the pauses that can make conversations feel unnatural or cause agents to talk over callers. At the 99th percentile, Alma takes approximately 200 milliseconds against 2,000 milliseconds for GPT-4.1, so even calls at the slow end of the distribution remain responsive. Alma costs 55 cents per blended million tokens, making it 84% cheaper than GPT-4.1 at $3.50 and 90% cheaper than GPT-5.4 at $5.63. On speed, Alma is 63% faster to first token than GPT-4.1 and 82% faster than GPT-5.6. This gives voice agents the speed and cost advantages needed for high-volume phone interactions.
The performance difference can translate directly into revenue for businesses. One Phonely customer that switched from OpenAI to Alma saw a 3% increase in sales conversion, resulting in an additional $300,000 in revenue per month.
Every Phonely customer runs on Alma automatically as part of the platform. Enterprises can also purchase custom Alma deployments with dedicated rate limits and deployment options tailored to their infrastructure.
Additional Resources:
- Phonely Raises $16M Series A to Make Every Phone Call Smarter
- How can AI reduce wait times in customer service?
- How To Improve First-Call Resolution Rates with AI
About Phonely
Phonely is an AI-powered voice agent platform based in San Francisco. The company helps businesses answer every call with intelligent, natural-sounding AI agents that book appointments, resolve inquiries, and drive revenue. Learn more at phonely.ai.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260901605297/en/
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