Glossary
Every term this documentation uses that does not mean the obvious thing, or that Sphoro Voice uses more narrowly than the industry does. Defined once, here, so no other page has to stop and explain itself.
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| Agent | The configuration a call runs under: languages, prompt, voice, tools, flow, carrier. Not a running thing — the running thing is a call. See agent reference. |
| Autonomy | Who holds the agent's end of a conversation: a model (agentic), a person in a browser (simple), or a model with named switches (custom). Only under custom is the capabilities block read. See kinds of agent. |
| Barge-in | The caller interrupting the agent mid-sentence, and the agent stopping. Configured by words and phrases rather than by volume, so a caller saying "mm-hm" does not cut the agent off. See conversation behaviour. |
| Campaign | A journey run over a list of contacts. See campaigns. |
| Chain | An ordered list of vendors for one job — transcription, voice or model. The call uses the first that works and falls through on failure. See vendors. |
| Direction | inbound or outbound. Available in a prompt as {{call_direction}}. |
| DTMF | Keypad tones. The digits a caller presses, either signalled by the carrier or heard in the audio. See keypad and IVR. |
| Edge | A way out of a flow node. Four kinds — intent, expression, always, event. See flows. |
| End reason | Which of about thirty ways a call finished. The field to branch on; a call that reached voicemail and one that reached a customer both "complete". See transfers and endings. |
| Endpointing | Deciding that the caller has stopped speaking rather than merely paused. The first stage of the latency budget. |
| Extraction | A typed field pulled out of the transcript after the call — a name, a number, a yes/no, one of a fixed set. See post-call analysis. |
| Filler phrase | Something the agent says while a tool call is running, so a three-second lookup sounds like thinking rather than a dropped line. |
| Flow | Structure within one call: named nodes and the edges between them. Contrast with a journey. See flows. |
| Function | Something the agent can do mid-call by calling your API. Also "tool" — the two words are used interchangeably here and mean the same thing. See tools and functions. |
| Grounding | Answering from your documents rather than the model's memory. See knowledge base. |
| Idempotency key | A header you supply so a retried request cannot place a second call. See using your API key. |
| Journey | Structure across calls and days: dial, branch on the outcome, wait, retry. Contrast with a flow. See journeys. |
| Knowledge base | A set of documents, chunked and indexed, that an agent can answer from. See knowledge base. |
| Language entry | One item in an agent's languages list, carrying that language's voice, greeting and prompt. The first entry is the one calls open in. See language and voice. |
| Mode | Whether a model is in the loop at all: conversation, keypad, normal or webrtc. See kinds of agent. |
| Persona | The idea an agent deploys — prompt, voice, knowledge, flow — separated from the telephone it deploys on. See personas. |
| Project | A cost centre inside your account, optionally with a monthly budget. Not a tenant and not an isolation boundary. See projects. |
| Suppression list | Your do-not-call list. Checked before every outbound call, and added to automatically when a caller asks not to be called again. See compliance. |
| Turn | One exchange: the caller speaks, the agent answers. The unit the latency budget is measured over. |
| Voice line | A fixed piece of speech rendered once and replayed, rather than synthesised on every call. See voice lines. |
| Workflow | The work that happens after the conversation — book, update a CRM, send an email. See workflows. |
Where these appear
Most of the terms above are fields on an agent or a call, so the fastest way to attach a name to a thing is to read one of each and look:
curl -s https://voice.sphoro.com/v1/agents/$AGENT_ID \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SPHORO_API_KEY"
curl -s https://voice.sphoro.com/v1/calls/$CALL_ID \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SPHORO_API_KEY"Two pairs that get confused
Both pairs sound like synonyms and are not, and mixing them up is the source of most of the "I configured it and nothing happened" reports we see.
| Within one call | Across many calls | |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Flow — which part of this conversation you are in | Journey — which call in the sequence you are on |
| Grouping | Agent group — settings shared by a fleet of agents | Project — what the calls cost, and to whom |