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Actions are tasks an agent performs during a call rather than after it. Transfer the call, press a key, hang up, or call your own API and use the answer in the next sentence. Actions are created once here and then added to any agent.

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The two tabs

Phone Actions covers things the agent does to the call itself. Custom External Actions covers calling your own API.

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The five types

Create Action asks which kind you want. The first three and the last are phone actions. Custom Input is the one that creates a custom external action.
Several of these overlap with skills. Call Routing and End Call cover the same ground with less setup. Reach for an action when you need a trigger or a configuration the skill does not offer.

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Building a custom external action

The Custom External Actions form showing Speak on Send and Speak on Receive as toggles, Processing Mode, and an input schema property with a live JSON preview
The trigger question is the important one, and it is not a label. It is what the agent reads to decide whether this action applies, so write it as a sentence: “If the caller asks where their order is and has given an order number, look it up.” Speak on Send and Speak on Receive are toggles, not scripts. You are deciding whether the agent may speak at those moments, not writing what it says. With both off the agent goes quiet while the request is in flight, which is what Muted means.
Turn Speak on Send on for anything slow. Silence on a phone call reads as a dropped connection, and a caller who hears nothing for three seconds starts saying “hello?”.

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The Signature Secret field does nothing

Signature Secret is stored and never used. Nothing in Fluents signs outbound requests, so filling this in does not let your endpoint verify that a request came from us. Do not treat it as security.If you need to authenticate incoming requests, put a secret in the URL path or use an Account Connection, and treat the endpoint as publicly reachable.

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The input schema

The schema is what the agent has to collect before it may call your endpoint. Add Property takes a Name, an optional Description, a Type and a Required field toggle. Types are String, Number and Boolean. There are no arrays or nested objects. The JSON preview beside the form updates as you go, so you can see exactly what your endpoint will receive.
Descriptions on properties are worth writing. They are how the agent knows what it is asking for. “The order number the caller gives, digits only” gets you a cleaner value than a bare order_number.
The agent collects the required fields through conversation, calls your endpoint, and uses the response to carry on.

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The list

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Actions or webhooks

Both send data to a URL you control. The difference is whether the conversation waits. An action happens during the call and the agent uses the answer. A webhook happens after something occurs and nobody is waiting. If the agent needs to say something based on the response, you want an action. If you just need your systems to know, you want a webhook.

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Where to go next

  • Add the action to an agent: Agents
  • Notify your systems instead: Webhooks
  • Check whether an action ran on a call: Calls