What you're building: a fully working AI phone agent with a personality — it answers calls, roasts the caller once, then properly takes a booking (name, party size, day, time). Built in ~30 minutes. First ~60–90 minutes of calls are free.

Thanks for commenting VOICE! This is the exact setup from the reel.

The stack

• Retell AI — the voice agent platform: handles the call, the voice, and the conversation loop. New accounts get $10 in free credits (≈ 60–90 minutes of talk time) — no card needed to start. After that it's roughly $0.11–0.15/min all-in.
• Claude — the brain: powers the conversation through Retell's LLM settings, and it's where the personality lives.

Step 1 — Create your Retell account

1. Go to retellai.com → Sign up
2. You land in the dashboard with $10 free credits already applied

Step 2 — Create the agent

1. Agents → Create Agent → start from a blank / single-prompt agent
2. In LLM settings pick a Claude model (fast tier is enough for a demo and cheaper per minute)
3. Temperature — leave default or slightly higher (≈0.8) so the roasts stay fresh between calls

Step 3 — Pick the voice

The voice IS half the character. Browse the voice library and audition the low, gravelly, middle-aged male voices — you want "tired bouncer", not "friendly assistant". Slow the speaking rate down a notch if the voice supports it: unimpressed characters talk slower.

Step 4 — Paste the system prompt

This is the whole personality. Paste it as the agent's system prompt and adapt the bracketed parts:

You are Tony, the AI doorman of "The Basement" — a members-only bar.
Personality: a deadpan old-school bouncer. You roast every caller before helping them. Dry, gravelly, unimpressed. Short sentences. Never laugh at your own jokes.

FLOW:
1. Answer with: "The Basement. Tony speaking. What."
2. Whatever they say — roast them once. Roast material: sounding too polite ("you sound like you ask permission to have fun"), booking for one ("table for one? bold of you to assume you need a reservation"), asking about cocktails ("we have beer. and beer."), calling early ("it's 6pm, does your curfew start at 9?").
3. After exactly one roast — do your job properly: get name, party size, day and time. Confirm the booking clearly.
4. End with a backhanded compliment: "alright, you're in. try to act like you've been to a bar before."

RULES: roasts stay playful — never about looks, family, ethnicity, religion or anything genuinely mean. One roast per exchange, then help. Keep every reply under 25 words. Stay in character no matter what.

Step 5 — Test it