Custom Tools

Your AI agent can do more than just talk. With tools, your agent takes real actions mid-conversation—checking a calendar, looking up a customer, handing off to a teammate, or calling one of your own systems.

You set up the tools once, write a clear description of when each should fire, and your agent uses them on its own when the conversation calls for it.

Tools depend on your agent type#

dialnote has two kinds of agents, and each has its own set of tools. Pick the right list for the agent you're building (see Creating an AI Agent).

Voice agent tools#

Voice agents handle phone calls. They support these tools:

Transfer to Team — Route the call to one or more team members. Set a ring strategy (simultaneous or sequential) and how long each phone rings (5–120 seconds, default 30). Under When no one answers, pick Send the caller to voicemail (the default) or Play a message and end the call. The Message if no one answers comes pre-filled with default text you can edit, and it also plays if voicemail is off on the number that took the call.

Transfer to Another AI Agent — Pass the live call to a different AI agent in your organization. Useful for routing, say, a sales call to your booking agent.

Send SMS — Text the person on the call while the call is live. Choose Predefined message for fixed text, or AI-generated to let the AI write one from a Generation Prompt.

Check Availability — Read open time slots from a connected calendar so the agent can tell callers when you're free.

Book Meeting — Schedule an appointment on a connected calendar and confirm it on the call.

Custom Webhook — Call any external API. This is how your agent looks up an order, checks stock, or triggers a workflow in your own systems.

Order Lookup — Read order status and details from a connected Shopify store.

Message agent tools#

Message agents handle text conversations in the Inbox. They support a different six, and you add them on Step 3 (Capabilities) of the message-agent wizard with + Add Action:

End Conversation — Close out the chat when everything's resolved.

Transfer to Human — Hand the conversation to a teammate.

Lookup Contact — Pull up the contact's record to personalize the reply.

Send Link — Share a URL with the contact.

Book Meeting — Record a meeting request as a conversation note so a teammate can follow up. It doesn't add anything to a calendar.

Custom Webhook — Call an external HTTPS API (GET or POST). Requests time out after 10 seconds by default, up to 30 seconds.

Creating a tool#

For voice agents, you add tools in Step 4 (Actions) of the agent wizard. Here's the flow:

1. Click Add action to open the tool modal
2. Pick the tool type
3. Fill in the shared fields:
   • Name — For voice agents, the name must start with a letter and can only contain letters, numbers, and underscores (max 64 characters). It also has to be unique within the agent.
   • Description — Tell the AI when to use this tool (10–1,000 characters for voice agents)
4. Configure the tool-specific settings
5. Save, and the tool is available to your agent right away

The description does the heavy lifting—it's what tells your agent when to fire the tool. Be specific. Instead of "Book appointments," write "Book a consultation when the caller wants to meet with a sales rep."

Custom webhooks#

A custom webhook lets your agent call an external API during the conversation. It's how you connect dialnote to your existing business systems.

When you set up a voice-agent webhook, you'll configure:

• Webhook URL — The endpoint that receives the request
• HTTP Method — GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE
• Speak while executing — An optional line the agent says while it waits for the response (e.g., "One moment while I check that for you...")
• Speak with result — Whether the agent reads the API response back to the caller

Example use cases#

Order lookup — Caller asks "Where's my order?" Your webhook hits your e-commerce API and the agent reads the tracking info back.

CRM update — After the agent captures lead details, the webhook pushes them to your CRM. (For built-in syncing, see CRM integrations.)

Inventory check — Caller asks about a product. The webhook queries your inventory system and the agent answers with live stock levels.

Scheduling tools#

The Check Availability and Book Meeting voice tools connect to Calendly or Cal.com.

To set one up:

1. Choose Check Availability or Book Meeting
2. Pick your Calendar Provider (Calendly or Cal.com). Calendly needs a Calendly Standard plan or higher, plus at least one Meeting Location from the event type.
3. Enter your API key (or pick a calendar you've already connected)
4. Select the event type the agent should use

When the caller's phone number shows their timezone, the agent says times in the caller's zone and books with it. Otherwise it uses the Fallback Timezone set on Step 1, Basic Info (for example, on toll-free numbers and web calls). After setup, you can run a test connection to confirm the credentials work—dialnote reads real availability and, for booking, creates then auto-cancels a test slot.

See Calendar integrations for connecting Calendly and Cal.com.

Tips for better tools#

Write clear descriptions. The AI relies on your description to know when to use each tool. "Transfer to team when caller asks to speak to a human or the AI can't help" is better than "Transfer call."

Test before going live. Use the test feature to check that your tools trigger correctly. Try different phrasings to see if the AI picks up on the right cues.

Keep webhooks fast. Callers don't like waiting. If your API is slow, add caching or move heavy processing to a background job.

Don't overload your agent. Five well-configured tools will outperform fifteen poorly-described ones. The AI can get confused if too many tools have overlapping purposes.

What's next#

• Configure your agent — voice, language, and instructions
• Add knowledge bases so your agent can answer from your own content
• Test your agent before it takes real calls