Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 17, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce is adding voice to its Agentforce software, letting clients go beyond text when using artificial intelligence agents to respond to customer questions.
With Agentforce Voice, companies can customize the tone and speed of voices and adjust the pronunciation of specific terms, Salesforce said Monday, ahead of its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. The feature also allows people to interrupt the AI agent during phone calls.
Voice is becoming a bigger part of the generative AI boom, which started with text-based prompts in late 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. In the past year, OpenAI and Anthropic have enabled their chatbots to conduct spoken conversations without sounding overly robotic. Now that capability is taking hold inside business software.
Agentforce Voice will integrate with corporate phone systems from Amazon, Five9, Genesys, Nice and Ericsson’s Vonage.
Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor is also trying his hand in the market. Taylor helped start Sierra in 2023, and last year the startup announced that its AI agents “can now pick up the phone.” Sierra has been valued at $10 billion, and has a client list that includes ADT, SiriusXM and SoFi.
Salesforce has been under pressure this year in part due to investor concern that software companies could lose business as AI moves deeper into coding. The stock is down about 28% so far in 2025, while the Nasdaq has gained around 15% over that stretch.
Anthropic told reporters in September that its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model built a chat app similar to Salesforce’s Slack in 30 hours. In Salesforce’s latest earnings report, the company warned that new AI products “may disrupt workforce needs and negatively impact demand for our offerings.”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has downplayed the risk to this company.
“When we get into this kind of zero-sum game, well, all this is going to get wiped out, or all this is going to change, then, you know, you’re not dealing with somebody who actually runs a company, because that’s not the way business works,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan last month. “Business is incremental, it’s evolutionary, it’s growing, it’s evolving, and we don’t see that kind of change.”
Salesforce launched Agentforce last year as a service that could respond to customer requests over text chats with help from generative AI models. Agentforce now has more than 12,000 implementations, according to a statement. But there’s some skepticism about its popularity.
“Investor enthusiasm around Agentforce has moderated as adoption has lagged expectations,” RBC Capital Markets analysts, who recommend holding the stock, wrote in a note to clients last week.
In November, Salesforce will provide early access to Agent Script software, which organizations can use to customize what agents say and do.
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