Skip to main content
Your agent has a recognition vocabulary: a list of words you want it to hear correctly. Adding your business name, your staff names, and your trade’s vocabulary stops it mishearing the words that matter most on your calls. This is about hearing rather than speaking, and it is the single highest value fix for an agent that seems to misunderstand people.

​
Before you start

  • A call where a word was misheard. Read the transcript to see what your agent thought it heard.
  • The words themselves: your business name, your staff, your products, your local place names.
  • You will be working from a call transcript, where you can select a word and add it.

​
Steps

1

Open a call where the word was misheard

Go to your call history and open the call. See Read a call transcript.
2

Select the word in the transcript

Highlight the word your agent got wrong. Choose Add this word to recognition vocabulary, which is offered as Help AI hear this.
3

Add the correct spelling

Add the word as it should be, not as your agent heard it. Add each variant your callers actually say, including the short form of your business name.
4

Test it

Call your agent and say the word in a normal sentence, then read the transcript back to check it landed.

​
You will know it worked when

  • The transcript of a new call shows the word spelled correctly.
  • Your agent answers a question containing that word instead of asking the caller to repeat it.

​
What to add first

​
What this does not fix

This is a hearing fix, not a speaking fix. It improves how reliably your agent understands a word when a caller says it. If your agent says a word wrongly, that is the voice rather than the vocabulary, and the options are different: try another voice, or spell the word phonetically in your instructions where it is said aloud. See Available voices and My agent sounds wrong.

​
FAQ

Add it to the recognition vocabulary from a transcript where it was misheard, along with the short form your callers use. Business names are rarely ordinary words, which is why this is usually the first thing worth adding.
How it hears it. Recognition vocabulary helps your agent understand a word when a caller says it. Changing how the word sounds coming out of your agent is a voice question. See Available voices.
From a call transcript. Select the word your agent got wrong and choose to add it to the recognition vocabulary, which means the words you add are always ones that actually caused a problem on a real call.
Read the transcript of a later call containing the word. The transcript shows what your agent heard, so a correctly spelled word there is proof, whereas a call that merely went well is not.
No. Add the words that come up on calls and get misheard. A long list of words nobody says adds nothing, and the ones worth adding announce themselves in your transcripts within a week.
It helps with the specific words you add, which is often enough, because the words that break a call are usually your names and your trade terms rather than ordinary English. It does not change how your agent handles an accent generally.
Check each agent after adding, since the fix is only useful where the word actually comes up. If you run a second agent that handles the same calls, test it with the same word rather than assuming.