AI Voice Agents for Government

A Retell AI voice agent answers the calls that fill a department's queue: the status of a permit, inspection, violation or summons, account questions, and hours, fees and closures. It looks up status in your records system through a custom function, answers public information from your website and documents, and can text the caller a link to the page they need. Calls it should not handle go to the right person: building questions to an inspector, everything else to your call center during open hours, and an after-hours ticket for staff to pick up when the office reopens.

You set the rule in the agent's prompt. A common choice is to offer the transfer as soon as a caller asks for a person, instead of making them argue with the agent. During open hours the agent transfers the call to your call center or a department line, and with a warm transfer it can brief the staff member privately before the caller is connected. Outside open hours it takes the caller's details, creates a ticket or callback request in your system, and tells the caller what happens next.

Retell's documentation lists SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certification, HIPAA compliance with a self-signed BAA, and GDPR compliance with a DPA. Certificates and audit reports are in the Retell Trust Center, and the support team handles custom security reviews, vendor assessments and subprocessor lists. Each agent has its own data storage setting (Everything, Everything except PII, or Basic Attributes Only), a retention period from 1 day to 2 years, and PII scrubbing for names, addresses, account numbers and similar fields. The Enterprise plan adds custom MSA and DPA terms, SSO and role-based access control, and enterprise customers with an MSA do not have their data used to train models. If your procurement checklist asks for a government-specific authorization, confirm it with the Retell team before the review starts, because the docs list only the certifications above.

Yes. Set the agent to speak first with a custom welcome message, and it reads your exact wording at the start of every call, for example that the caller is on a recorded line. If a department should not keep recordings, set that agent to Basic Attributes Only so no recordings or transcripts are stored, or set a retention period so they are deleted automatically.

Yes. Keep your numbers and route calls to the agent through SIP trunking, through a contact center platform such as Five9, Amazon Connect, Genesys or Avaya, or through carriers such as Twilio, Telnyx and Vonage. Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Zendesk connect natively for contact lookups, cases and tickets. Permitting, code enforcement, records and billing systems have no prebuilt connector, so the agent reaches them through a custom function that calls your API, or through webhooks that send call data to your system. The knowledge base reads your public website and documents and can re-crawl pages every 24 hours, so hours and closures stay current.

Retell bills per minute of call time, from $0.07 to $0.31 depending on the model and voice you choose, with no platform fee. Pay as you go starts with $10 in free credits and 20 concurrent calls, with more concurrency available on demand. The Enterprise plan has custom pricing, custom MSA and DPA terms, SSO and 24/7 support with a dedicated portal. The pricing page has the full breakdown.

Yes. You can start with one line, such as a permits desk or a parks office, and add departments when the first agent is working. Each department can have its own agent with its own knowledge base, transfer numbers and data settings, and one agent can hand a caller to another department's agent mid-call with the conversation history attached. Concurrency is set per workspace, and each agent can take any number of calls at once within that limit.