# Buyer guides

VoiceAgents has 8 guides on AI voice agent platforms and vendors, grouped by country.

## General

- [Getting Started: A Pilot Plan for Your First AI Phone Agent](https://voiceagents.fyi/guides/ai-phone-agent-pilot-plan.md): Run a small, measured pilot before you commit. Pick one call type, set success measures, sign the compliance documents, test on recorded scripts, go live on a share of calls with a human fallback, then review the recordings and decide.
- [AI Receptionist vs Contact-Centre Voice AI vs Outbound Calling vs Voice API](https://voiceagents.fyi/guides/ai-receptionist-vs-contact-center-ai-vs-outbound-vs-voice-api.md): An AI receptionist answers a business's inbound calls. Contact-centre voice AI automates a support queue at scale. Outbound calling software makes calls and must follow consent rules. A voice API gives engineers the parts to build their own agent.
- [AI Voice Agent Pricing Explained: Per-Minute, Subscription and Usage Stacks](https://voiceagents.fyi/guides/ai-voice-agent-pricing-explained.md): Most AI voice agents bill per minute of talk time. The total is a stack: a platform fee, the language model, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and telephony. Some vendors bundle the stack into one rate; others sell annual contracts.
- [AI Voice Agent Security and Compliance Checklist](https://voiceagents.fyi/guides/ai-voice-agent-security-and-compliance-checklist.md): Before an AI voice agent takes real calls, check five areas: HIPAA and a BAA for health data, a SOC 2 report, a GDPR processing agreement, PCI DSS for card payments, and call recording and robocall consent rules, including the FCC's 2024 ruling on AI voices.
- [Build vs Buy: Open-Source Frameworks, Managed Platforms and Voice APIs](https://voiceagents.fyi/guides/build-vs-buy-ai-voice-agents.md): You can build a voice agent on an open-source framework such as Pipecat or LiveKit Agents, assemble it from voice AI APIs, or buy a managed platform. Building gives control and needs engineers. Buying is faster and gives less control.
- [How to Choose an AI Voice Agent Platform](https://voiceagents.fyi/guides/how-to-choose-an-ai-voice-agent-platform.md): Start with the calls you want to automate. Then check six things in order: call type, integrations, compliance, concurrency, pricing model and control. Test a short list of vendors on your own calls before you sign.
- [Questions to Ask an AI Voice Agent Vendor Before You Sign](https://voiceagents.fyi/guides/questions-to-ask-an-ai-voice-agent-vendor.md): Ask about the full cost at your volume, concurrency limits, which model and voice providers the vendor uses, data retention, compliance documents, human handoff and how you leave. Get every answer in writing.
- [Voice AI Glossary: Terms Buyers Meet in Vendor Calls](https://voiceagents.fyi/guides/voice-ai-glossary.md): Plain definitions of the voice AI terms that vendors use: latency, barge-in, turn detection, STT and ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, SIP trunking, warm transfer, concurrency, BAA and more.