Connecting an AI Voice Agent to an Australian Phone Number

The short version: every major AI voice platform can answer calls on an Australian phone number, but almost none of them will sell you one. You bring the number; they bring the agent. Click2Call has ready-made connection profiles for nine of them, so the routing is a dropdown rather than a project. The real decision is not which model sounds best — it is whether you are willing to run a server, because that splits the nine into two very different groups.

Every provider at a glance

These nine have built-in profiles in the Click2Call portal under Voice → Profiles. Pick the provider from the Connection Type list and the SIP routing is filled in for you.

Anything not on this list that speaks SIP can still be connected using generic SIP registration — see connecting an AI voice agent.

The split that actually matters: no-code or developer integration

Most comparisons of AI voice platforms talk about voice quality and latency. Those matter, but they are not what determines whether you can get an agent answering your phone this afternoon. This is:

Four you can set up without writing anything

ElevenLabs, Retell AI, Synthflow and Vapi are all configured entirely in the provider’s own dashboard. You write the agent’s prompt, choose a voice, and import your Australian number at their end. On the Click2Call side you select the provider and, for Vapi only, paste in an Assistant ID.

Vapi is the shortest of the four: the assistant ID goes in the profile, Click2Call builds sip:<assistant_id>@sip.vapi.ai:5060, and there is nothing to configure at Vapi’s end at all. ElevenLabs, Retell and Synthflow each want the number imported and an agent attached to it before they will answer.

Three that need a developer

OpenAI and xAI both require a webhook endpoint that you host. When a call arrives, the provider sends a realtime.call.incoming event, and your code has to accept the call before any audio connects. With xAI you then open a WebSocket to run the conversation. Neither is a dashboard-only setup, and this is the single most common wrong assumption we see — people pick OpenAI because it is the name they know, then discover the phone rings and nothing answers because there is no webhook behind it.

LiveKit Cloud is a third case again. It is real-time media infrastructure rather than a hosted agent, so once a call lands in a LiveKit room something has to join that room and speak — normally a LiveKit Agents worker you write and deploy. It also needs an inbound trunk and at least one dispatch rule before it will accept a call at all.

Two that are routing layers, not agents

Twilio and Cloudonix sit in a different category. Neither is an AI agent. They are programmable layers that receive the call and decide what happens next, which often means handing it on to one of the agents above.

Twilio is the right choice when your call logic already lives there — a Studio Flow, an IVR, a Flex contact centre — but you want an Australian number with local porting and local support. One thing worth flagging: the Click2Call profile routes to a Twilio SIP Domain under Programmable Voice, not to Elastic SIP Trunking, which uses a different host ending in pstn.twilio.com and will not work. Cloudonix earns its place when routing decisions have to happen before the agent, or when you want to swap AI providers without touching carrier configuration. For one agent on one number, connect that provider directly and skip the extra hop.

The Australian number is the part nobody solves for you

This is the constraint that shapes everything else. The AI platforms are largely American, they resell American numbers, and none of the major ones sell Australian geographic landlines or 1300 numbers. A US number on an Australian tradesperson’s website is not a small cosmetic problem — local callers do not ring it.

So the practical shape of every one of these integrations is bring-your-own-number: Click2Call provides the Australian number, the porting and the support, and the AI provider provides the agent. Local and mobile numbers typically port across in 5 to 10 business days, and 1300 and 1800 numbers can be ported too. Most businesses test the agent on a new number first and move the main number once it behaves.

What is the same for all nine

Whichever provider you pick, the Click2Call side is the same three things.

1. Create the profile. Voice → Profiles, choose the provider from the Connection Type list, and fill in the one identifier if that provider needs one.
2. Assign the number to it. Voice → Line Manager, set the Profile column. This is the step people miss: the Default profile applies to every line with no profile assigned, so a number left on Default quietly ignores everything you just configured.
3. Set the time zone. Business hours, after-hours routing and queue schedules all read the Time Zone on the profile. Get it wrong and the phones open and close at the wrong local time.

There is one more thing worth knowing before you start, because it causes a failure that looks like a password problem and is not. Click2Call cannot present a username and password on an outbound INVITE, so the provider has to trust us by IP allowlist. The address to give them is 103.212.52.19. If a provider challenges the call for credentials and returns a 407 Proxy Authentication Required, that is the symptom of our address not being on their allowlist, and no amount of changing credentials will fix it.

Recording, transcription and the compliance question

Calls answered by an AI agent are still calls on your account, so recording, transcription, AI summaries and sentiment analysis all work exactly as they do for a human-answered call — and the transcripts are usually the most valuable part of the whole setup, because they are how you find out what your agent is getting wrong.

Two caveats. Recording is off by default and is enabled per number, so if you are waiting for a transcript that never appears, that is almost always why. And Australian law requires all parties to be aware the call is being recorded, which the profile can handle by playing an announcement. Recordings and transcripts are stored in Australia and New Zealand. See AI voice tools for what the analysis actually produces.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start

If you have a developer and want the newest models, start with OpenAI or xAI and budget for the webhook. If you want an agent answering the phone this week, start with ElevenLabs or Retell AI. Either way the Australian number is the same number, and moving between providers later is a dropdown, not a migration.

Every provider has its own step-by-step guide covering both ends of the connection, linked from the table above and from the AI voice agent hub. If you would rather we set it up, our Australian support team can do the configuration with you.