Voice Agent Overview

What It Is

The ChurchWiseAI Voice Agent is an AI-powered phone receptionist that answers church calls 24/7. When a member, visitor, or community member calls a church phone number, the voice agent picks up immediately, greets the caller by church name, and handles their request -- prayer submissions, service time questions, visitor welcome, callback scheduling, directions, giving, and more.

The agent speaks naturally using Cartesia Sonic text-to-speech, understands callers via Deepgram speech-to-text, and reasons through requests using large language models. It is not an IVR menu tree. Callers speak naturally and the agent responds conversationally.

Agent Architecture: Two Agents, Not Four

The voice agent uses a two-agent architecture: Coordinator and Care.

Agent	Role	LLM	Temperature
Coordinator	Front door for all calls. Handles general inquiries, service times, events, directions, visitor intake, giving/tithing, and event registration. Routes to Care when pastoral topics arise.	Gemini 2.5 Flash	0.7
Care	Pastoral care specialist. Handles prayer requests, grief, loss, emotional distress, crisis situations, and callback scheduling for pastoral follow-up.	Claude Haiku 4.5	0.4

Why Two Agents, Not Four

An earlier design split responsibilities across four agents (Coordinator, Care, Stewardship, Discipleship). This was reduced to two for phone-specific reasons:

Phone calls are linear. Unlike chat, there is no sidebar or typing indicator. Every handoff creates a silence gap that feels like a dropped call. Fewer agents = fewer gaps.
Stewardship merged into Coordinator. Giving/tithing questions are logistically similar to service times -- the caller wants a link or an answer, not pastoral depth. The Coordinator handles giving directly via the send_giving_link tool.
Discipleship deferred. Discipleship content (Bible study, theological questions) is better served by the chatbot where callers can read lengthy responses. The voice agent keeps calls short and action-oriented.

Why Verbal Handoff, Not Menus

The handoff from Coordinator to Care is conversational, not menu-driven. The Coordinator empathizes first ("I'm sorry to hear that"), asks consent ("Would you like to speak with someone who can help with that?"), then transfers. This mirrors how a real church receptionist would handle a caller who starts crying.

There is no "Press 1 for prayer, Press 2 for service times" menu. Callers speak naturally and the agent routes based on intent.

Technology Stack

Component	Technology	Notes
SDK	LiveKit Agents SDK (`livekit-agents~=1.5`, Python)	Multi-turn voice agent framework
Hosting	LiveKit Cloud + Railway	LiveKit Cloud handles SIP gateway and room management; Railway hosts the Python agent worker
STT	Deepgram	Via `livekit-plugins-deepgram`
TTS	Cartesia Sonic	Via `livekit-plugins-cartesia`
Primary LLM	Gemini 2.5 Flash	Coordinator agent
Care LLM	Claude Haiku 4.5	Care agent (better empathy)
Fallback LLMs	Cross-fallback	Coordinator falls back to Haiku; Care falls back to Gemini
Telephony	Twilio SIP trunk	Phone number provisioning; SIP trunk forwards to LiveKit Cloud SIP gateway
Database	Supabase	Church config, call logs, prayer requests, visitor contacts
Embeddings	OpenAI text-embedding-3-small	RAG vector search (1536 dimensions)

Multi-Tenant Architecture

ONE deployed agent instance serves ALL churches. There is no per-church deployment. When a call arrives:

The inbound Twilio number is matched to a church via PHONE_REGISTRY (static dict) or church_voice_agents table (DB lookup).
The church's full configuration is loaded from Supabase (voice settings, plan tier, feature toggles, custom FAQs, staff, hours, events).
The agent is built on-the-fly with church-specific prompts, tools, and RAG context.
The call proceeds. All tool actions (prayer requests, callbacks, visitor captures) are saved against that church's ID.

New customer onboarding requires only a database row in church_voice_agents, a Twilio number configured to forward via SIP trunk to the LiveKit Cloud SIP gateway, and the SIP trunk set up to route to the LiveKit project -- no code deploy.

Pricing

Voice agent plans are monthly only (no annual option) because Deepgram (STT) and Cartesia (TTS) charge per-minute, making cost prediction for annual billing impractical.

Plan	Monthly Price	Includes	Call Limit
Voice Starter	$39.95	Voice agent only	Per-plan limit
Voice Pro	$69.95	Voice agent only	Higher limit
Starter Bundle (Voice + Chat)	$49.95	Voice agent + chatbot	Per-plan limit
Pro Bundle (Voice + Chat)	$79.95	Voice agent + chatbot	Higher limit
Suite Bundle (Voice + Chat)	$99.95	Voice agent + chatbot, white-label	Highest limit

All tiers include Coordinator + Care agents. The tier determines call volume limits and feature toggles (e.g., Planning Center integration, Cal.com booking, white-label branding on Suite).

See C:\dev\PRICING.md for Stripe product/price IDs and complete billing rules.

Current State (March 2026)

3 demo churches configured: Grace Community (Protestant), St. Joseph Catholic Parish, The Bridge Community
3 Stripe subscriptions — Melvindale CoG is the designated internal test account (100% coupon cwa-validation-100pct, sub_1TIUbGFaoK5IPzNowJrWhgDM, all invoices net $0, safe for billing/Stripe/webhook E2E testing); Zewdei/Medhanialem (starter, 100% coupon through June 2026); Hope Community (starter, cancelling)
Migrated to LiveKit Agents SDK: The previous Cartesia LINE SDK (voice-agent-line/) has been replaced by the LiveKit Agents SDK (voice-agent-livekit/). The Cartesia managed cloud experienced a multi-day outage in early 2026 (SDK 0.2.4 + wrapper crash) which drove the migration decision.
Sales line active: Toll-free +1XXXXXXXXXX routes to the Sales Agent. Demo lines route to the Demo Router Agent (offers choice of demo churches).
Deploy mechanism: Push to main branch → Railway auto-deploys. LiveKit Cloud connects automatically via the agent worker WebSocket.

Code Location

All voice agent code lives in churchwiseai-web/voice-agent-livekit/:

File	Purpose
`main.py`	Entry point. Routes calls by SIP trunk phone number via `JobContext.room.sip`.
`session.py`	Phone registry, Supabase client singleton, call lifecycle helpers, TTL cache.
`turn_processor.py`	Per-turn pipeline: reassurance, moderation, noise filtering, RAG, farewell detection.
`moderation.py`	Pre-LLM safety: threat detection, crisis detection, abuse escalation.
`call_handler.py`	Noise filtering taxonomy, mutual farewell detection, "are you there?" reassurance.
`verticals/church/agents.py`	Coordinator + Care agent builders.
`verticals/church/prompts.py`	Per-church prompt templates.
`verticals/church/tools.py`	Prayer requests, callbacks, visitor capture, event registration, giving.
`verticals/church/config.py`	Tier gating, agent type mapping, voice defaults.
`verticals/church/integrations/`	Planning Center, Cal.com, Supabase church data loader.
`verticals/sales/agents.py`	Sales Agent + Demo Router + Demo Agent builders.
`verticals/sales/prompts.py`	Sales and demo prompt templates.
`verticals/sales/tools.py`	Church search, demo scheduling, support capture.
`core/rag.py`	RAG: embeddings, vector search (church KB + theological), formatting.
`core/notifications.py`	Email + SMS alerts for threats, crises, prayer requests, callbacks.
`core/tools.py`	Shared tools: SMS link sending, directions link.

Legacy code (do NOT modify):

churchwiseai-web/voice-agent-line/ — the previous Cartesia LINE SDK implementation, replaced by voice-agent-livekit/.
churchwiseai-web/voice-agent/ — the old Node.js/Railway voice agent, fully replaced.

Database Tables

Table	Purpose
`church_voice_agents`	Per-church voice agent configuration (voice ID, greeting, notification contacts, feature toggles, integrations, pastor info, weekly content).
`voice_call_logs`	Call records: SID, church ID, caller number, transcript (JSONB), AI summary, duration, status, classification fields (category, urgency, sentiment, topics, follow-up, assignee).
`voice_prayer_requests`	Prayer requests captured by voice agent AND chatbot (shared table despite "voice_" prefix).
`voice_callback_requests`	Callback requests from voice agent AND chatbot.
`voice_visitor_contacts`	Visitor contact captures from voice agent AND chatbot.
`premium_churches`	Plan tier, call limits, call counts, custom church data (hours, staff, ministries, events).
`organization_settings`	Agent configuration (personality, enabled agents, handoff rules).
`church_knowledge_base`	Church-specific FAQ pairs and uploaded document chunks (used by RAG).
`moderation_violations`	Logged threat, crisis, and abuse events with severity and action taken.

What It Is​

Agent Architecture: Two Agents, Not Four​

Why Two Agents, Not Four​

Why Verbal Handoff, Not Menus​

Technology Stack​

Multi-Tenant Architecture​

Pricing​

Current State (March 2026)​

Code Location​

Database Tables​

See Also​