Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on September 17, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
sales force is adding voice to its Agentforce software, allowing it to go beyond text when answering customer questions using artificial intelligence agents.
Ahead of this week’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce announced Monday that with Agentforce Voice, businesses can customize the tone and speed of their voices and adjust the pronunciation of certain terms. This feature also allows you to interrupt the AI agent during a call.
Voice has become a big part of the generative AI boom that started with text-based prompts in late 2022 when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Over the past year, OpenAI and Anthropic have made it possible for chatbots to have voice conversations without sounding overly robotic. Now, that functionality is becoming entrenched within business software.
Agentforce Voice integrates with your company’s phone system. Amazon, five nine, genesis, nice and Ericsson’s Vonage.
Former Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor is also venturing into the market. Taylor helped launch Sierra in 2023, and last year the company announced that its AI agents were “now able to answer the phone.” Sierra is valued at $10 billion and its client list includes ADT, SiriusXM, and SoFi.
Salesforce has been under pressure this year, in part due to investor concerns that software companies could lose business as AI moves deeper into coding. Stocks are down about 28% so far in 2025, while the Nasdaq is up about 15% in that time.
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 call, the company warned that new AI products “could disrupt employee needs and negatively impact demand for our products.”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has downplayed the risks to the company.
“If we get into this kind of zero-sum game, everything is going to disappear or everything is going to change. Then you can’t do business with the people who actually run the companies, because that’s not how business works,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan last month. “The business is incremental, it’s evolving, it’s growing, it’s evolving, and we don’t see that kind of change.”
Salesforce launched Agentforce last year as a service that lets you respond to customer requests via text chat with the help of generative AI models. According to the statement, Agentforce currently has more than 12,000 implementations. However, there is some skepticism about its popularity.
“Investor enthusiasm for AgentForce has dampened as implementation has been slower than expected,” analysts at RBC Capital Markets, which recommends owning the stock, said in a note to clients last week.
In November, Salesforce will provide early access to Agent Script software that organizations can use to customize what their agents say and do.
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