Phonely Launches Alma, a Voice LLM

Phonely, providers of an artificial intelligence voice agent platform, has launched Alma, a large language model built specifically for voice agents to drive conversations forward.

Trained on more than 10 million real phone conversations, Alma is designed for interruptions, background voices, and transcription errors rather than only clean turn-taking. It enables self-improving agents that learn from live call data over time.

Alma works with any transcriber and text-to-speech provider, removes most of the prompt engineering teams do today, and its automatic failovers, multi-region routing and priority inference keep response times consistent.

"Every voice agent on the market is running on a model built for something else. We had the phone calls, so we built the model for the calls. It is already answering millions of Phonely calls monthly, and now anyone building in voice can use it," said Will Bodewes, CEO and co-founder of Phonely, in a statement.

Because Phonely owns the model and operates it across millions of live conversations, it can use those calls to continuously improve how agents perform. Alma identifies where conversations break down and feeds those learnings back into the model.

Coval, providers of an evaluation platform for voice AI, is one of the first companies to partner with Phonely, releasing self-improving voice agents that continuously identify and fix performance gaps based on real-world conversations. The collaboration connects Coval's evaluation platform with Phonely's Alma. Together, these technologies help businesses evaluate how their agents perform in real customer conversations and use those insights to improve agent performance over time.

"We initially met the Phonely team when we were in the same Y Combinator batch, and since then, our companies have grown up together," said Brooke Hopkins, founder and CEO of Coval, in a statement. "Phonely was also one of Coval's earliest customers, so we've seen firsthand how important it is for voice agents to constantly be improving and adjusting their interactions based on customer needs. Bringing Coval and Phonely together to close that loop and create a better customer experience is something we've been working toward for a long time, so it's incredibly exciting to see it come to life."

"The best voice agents are the ones that can self-improve over time by learning from the conversations they have with real customers. With Alma, we're giving businesses a model built specifically for voice, and Coval gives them a way to see what's working, what isn't and where the agent can improve," Bodewes said in a statement. "Brooke and I have been building alongside each other since we met, so I'm especially grateful that we get to work together on something we've both cared about from the beginning."