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Add tap-to-confirm to a Retell AI voice agent

Updated 2026-07-20
Retell bundles the voice pipeline into an opinionated platform, but structured fields are still captured by ear. Digit strings are the worst case: even at a strong 98% per-digit accuracy, a ten-digit phone number is only about 82% fully correct, so roughly one caller in five hands over a number with a wrong digit. That is a dead callback. Powsoo layers an on-screen confirmation card onto your Retell agent through its custom function support: the agent calls powsoo_show_card with the transcribed value, the caller taps Confirm or edits a character, and Powsoo fires a webhook with the final value. Setup is one web component plus one script tag and does not change how Retell runs the conversation.

Where a Retell agent loses data

Retell is an English-first, US-focused voice-agent platform with compliance built in. It handles the speech-to-text, model, and text-to-speech pipeline for you, which is convenient. But the capture problem is inherent to speech recognition, not to any one platform. Rare tokens like names, emails, and numbers are exactly what word-error-rate-optimised models protect least.

Phone numbers are the sharpest example. State-of-the-art over-the-telephone digit recognition reaches about 98% per digit, but accuracy compounds across a string: 0.98 to the tenth power is roughly 0.82, so about one ten-digit number in five contains at least one wrong digit. The agent reads it back confidently and the caller has to catch the error by ear.

Add on-screen confirmation with Powsoo

  1. Connect your Retell account in the Powsoo dashboard by pasting your Retell API key, which Powsoo encrypts server-side.
  2. In your Retell agent, add a server-side custom function named powsoo_show_card pointing at Powsoo’s endpoint, with speak_during_execution and speak_after_execution both off so the agent pauses silently while the card is on screen.
  3. Append Powsoo’s system-prompt snippet so the agent calls the function instead of asking callers to spell values back.
  4. Create a widget in Powsoo, then drop the <powsoo-voice widget-id="wid_…"> web component and the Powsoo widget script onto the page hosting the call.
  5. When Retell calls the function, Powsoo renders the card, the caller taps Confirm or edits a character, and the confirmed value flows back to the agent and on to your backend.

Which fields to confirm

Related

Frequently asked questions

Does Powsoo work with Retell&rsquo;s custom functions?

Yes. You add powsoo_show_card as a server-side custom function on the agent, pointing at Powsoo's endpoint. When Retell decides a field needs confirming, it calls that function with the transcribed value, and Powsoo renders the card in the browser.

Why do phone numbers fail on Retell voice calls?

Digits are short and acoustically confusable (O vs zero, fifteen vs fifty), and telephone bandwidth makes it worse. Whole-number accuracy compounds: at 98% per digit, a ten-digit number is only about 82% correct end to end.

What about phone-only Retell calls?

A PSTN call has no browser to render into. Use an SMS fallback so the caller confirms on their phone. See the tap-to-confirm vs SMS fallback guide.

Five minutes to zero spelling errors.

Go from zero to live confirmation cards in under five minutes.
No migration required.

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