Build your voice agent in 10 minutes (No code required) https://corey-ganim.kit.com/18da152cf4 In this episode, I sat down with Susan Westwater, co-founder of Pragmatic Digital and a conversational AI veteran since 2017, to build a working voice agent in Voiceflow live, with zero code. Susan walks through her exact prompt template for an appointment-scheduling agent, explains the difference between in-the-loop, on-the-loop, and fully autonomous agents, and shows how to separate your agent instructions from your knowledge base so you can update facts without breaking the whole build. We test the agent live (it called her cell phone mid-episode), connect it to a Google Sheet to capture customer intake, and talk about competitors like VAPI, ElevenLabs, and Voiceify. By the end, you'll have the exact playbook (and the template Susan is giving away) to spin up your own MVP voice agent in under an hour. Timestamps 03:42 – Inside Voiceflow and what makes it different 04:23 – Chatbot vs voice agent: listen, decide, act 05:30 – In the loop vs on the loop vs fully autonomous 09:09 – The system prompt: identity, purpose, and boundaries 11:54 – Voice, persona, and speech sculpting 13:22 – Separating agent instructions from knowledge base 17:14 – Stopping the agent from troubleshooting electrical issues 20:31 – Rules for collecting info one question at a time 23:21 – Pasting the prompt and one-shotting the build 26:34 – Voiceflow competitors: VAPI, ElevenLabs, Voiceify 30:22 – Connecting tools at each conversation step 33:13 – Why faster builds give up control 38:21 – Adding the knowledge base as a Word doc 43:13 – Sending customer intake to a Google Sheet 45:57 – Live phone call with the voice agent 50:09 – Branching, exit conditions, and iteration 54:52 – Custom voices, ElevenLabs integration, and voice security Key Points Keep two documents separate: agent instructions (how the agent behaves, its identity, persona, escalation rules) and knowledge base (the facts about your business). If pricing or hours change, you update one cell in your knowledge base instead of digging through a giant system prompt. The strength of a Voiceflow build lives in the prompt. Susan pastes her full instructions doc into the new project prompt and Voiceflow generates the entire conversation flow — greeting, qualification, intake, confirmation, escalation — with no coding. Be explicit about what the agent does NOT do. LLMs are trying to "win the game" (Susan's War Games analogy), so if you don't tell the electrical-appointment bot "do not troubleshoot," it will try to problem-solve its way out of every conversation. Collect intake one question at a time, use explicit confirmation on critical fields like callback numbers, and tell the agent to be empathetic but not apologetic — nobody wants a bot that says "I'm sorry" five times instead of solving the problem. Voiceflow — https://www.voiceflow.com Pragmatic Digital — Susan's agency helping brands operationalize conversational AI and applied AI for CX - https://www.pragmatic.digital VAPI — alternative voice agent platform - https://vapi.ai ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Voiceify — centralized library for chatbot, voice agent, and telephone deployments across web and mobile - https://www.voiceify.com Twilio — phone number and telephony layer for connecting Voiceflow agents to real phone calls - https://www.twilio.com Make.com — automation platform that can connect to Voiceflow as a tool integration - https://www.make.com Robert Scoble on X https://x.com/Scobleizer Brian Roemmele on X https://x.com/BrianRoemmele FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/coreyganim Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coreyganim/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyganim/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@coreyganim FIND SUSAN ON SOCIAL X: https://x.com/sjw75 Website: https://www.pragmatic.digital
