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How Vocadesk works

A high-level look at the moving parts, for developers and the technically curious. This describes the shape of the system — not its internal configuration.

Services

Vocadesk is a set of focused services rather than one monolith:

Service Role
Dashboard The web app you use to manage clients, agents, embeds, and review calls.
Management API The backend that owns all data and serves the dashboard.
Voice runtime The real-time voice pipeline that bridges callers and the AI provider, and produces transcripts and recordings.
Embed gateway & SDK Mints short-lived tokens for web calls and provides the drop-in browser button.
Billing Subscriptions, plans, usage metering, and invoices.

The dashboard talks only to the Management API; the voice runtime publishes what happens on a call as a stream of events that the API persists.

How a call flows

Caller (phone, web, or test)
   │
   ▼
Voice runtime  ──►  AI provider (speech + language)
   │  publishes events: started, transcript, ended, transferred, analyzed
   ▼
Management API  ──►  stores the call, transcript, recording, summary
   │
   ▼
Dashboard  ──►  you review it
  1. A call arrives — from a phone number, a web embed button, or a browser test call.
  2. The voice runtime looks up the agent, builds its instructions from the persona, knowledge, questions, and conversation design, and starts talking.
  3. As the conversation happens, it streams events — the call started, each transcript turn, a transfer, the call ended, and a post-call analysis.
  4. The Management API records those into the call's history.
  5. You see the result in Calls.

Channels

The same agent and the same pipeline serve three channels:

  • Phone — calls over the telephone network to an assigned phone number.
  • Web — browser calls from an embed, authorized by a short-lived token from the embed gateway.
  • Test — browser calls from the dashboard, for building and tuning agents.

Integrating

The most common integration point is the web embed — a single script tag and a button put a live agent on any website. See Web calls & embeds.

This is the public overview

Operational details — deployment, secrets, and internal runbooks — live in Vocadesk's private engineering docs, not here.

  • Call forwarding & transfers — Set the conditions under which an agent hands a call to a human, and understand exactly how the transfer behaves.
  • Calls — Review every conversation — transcripts, recordings, summaries, sentiment, and the data the agent captured.
  • Web calls & embeds — Let website visitors talk to an agent from a button — create an embed, set its origins, and install the snippet.
  • Getting started — From signing in to your first live call — the fastest path through Vocadesk.
  • Phone numbers — Attach a phone number to an agent so inbound calls are answered automatically.