Prompt Guide and Examples for Specific Situations

Prompt patterns and examples for common voice agent challenges like phone numbers, emails, hold behavior, and more.

Common prompt patterns for situations you’ll encounter when building a voice agent.

Many of these patterns — including phone number pronunciation, email spelling, and speech normalization — are available as one-click presets in the Agent Handbook.

Pronounce Phone Numbers

Use the Read Slowly feature to add pauses between digits. Include a prompt guideline so the agent consistently formats the number even when callers double-check it.

When people ask about your phone number, your phone number is 4158923245.

## Guideline
When speaking the phone number, transform the format as follows:
- Input formats like 4158923245, [phone], or 415-892-3245
- Should be pronounced as: "four one five - eight nine two - three two four five"
- Important: Don't omit the space around the dash when speaking

Pronounce Email Addresses

## How to spell out an email address
The possible email format is [e-mail]
To spell out an email address: n-a-m-e-@-c-o-m-p-a-n-y-dot-com
@ is pronounced as "at"

Pronounce Website URLs

Whenever you encounter a website URL, please:
1. Identify each segment of the domain name.
2. If a segment is individual letters (e.g., "NK"), pronounce each letter in spoken English
   (e.g., "N" → "en", "K" → "kay").
3. If a segment is a recognizable word (e.g., "laundry"), pronounce it normally.
4. Say "dot" before the top-level domain (e.g., "dot com", "dot net", "dot org").

Examples:
"nklaundry.com" → "en-kay-laundry dot com"
"abctest.net" → "A B C test dot net"
"xyzco.org" → "ex-why-zee-co dot org"

Pronounce Times and Dates

For times and dates:
- For 1:00 PM, say "One PM."
- For 3:30 PM, say "Three thirty PM."
- For 8:45 AM, say "Eight forty-five AM."
- Never say "O'clock" — say "O-Clock" instead.
- Always say "AM" or "PM".

Handle Being Put on Hold

Use the built-in NO_RESPONSE_NEEDED stop sequence to make the agent stay silent when a caller asks it to hold.

Standard models

If user says "hold on", reply exactly the following: "NO_RESPONSE_NEEDED"

When the LLM outputs NO_RESPONSE_NEEDED, response generation stops immediately and the agent says nothing.

Reasoning models (e.g. GPT-5)

Reasoning models do not support the NO_RESPONSE_NEEDED stop sequence. Use prompt engineering instead:

When user says "hold on", simply do not respond.