Product · 5 min
Why your agent still can’t pick up the phone
Jonas Weiß · 17 Sep 2026
Ask a good agent to plan a weekend in Vienna and it will compare trains, book a hotel and put the museum tickets in your calendar. Then ask it to move your dentist appointment from Thursday to Friday. It will draft a polite email, find the practice’s phone number, and hand the task back to you.
That handoff is the most common way agents fail today, and it has little to do with intelligence.
The last mile is still analog
A surprising share of everyday errands can only be done by phone. In Germany that is especially true: doctors’ practices without online booking, the plumber who never reads email, the bakery whose opening hours on Google are three years old, the public office with a hotline and nothing else. For a small business, the phone is the API: universal, synchronous, and needing no integration on their side at all.
Five reasons it is hard
A phone call needs a line. Telephony still runs on identity and licensing. A model can’t sign up for that.
Phones run in real time. A conversation tolerates about half a second of silence before it feels broken. You need speech-to-speech, not a loop of transcribe, think, synthesise.
The other end is messy. Call screening, mailboxes, phone menus, dialects, and people who answer a question you have not asked yet.
A phone call can’t be undone. So calling needs a plan you can read and approve before anything happens, and hard limits that hold even when the model is confused.
The law is specific. In Europe an AI that talks to people has to say so. Recording without consent is a criminal offence in Germany. Cold advertising calls to consumers are banned.