# Voice > Let visitors talk to the agent out loud and hear it reply, using the same knowledge and guardrails as text. Source: https://www.hey.support/docs/capabilities/voice --- Voice lets a visitor speak to the agent instead of typing, and hear the answer back. Open **Capabilities**, then **Voice**. Voice is available on **Growth and above**. On Free and Starter the panel shows an upgrade prompt. See [Plans](/docs/billing/plans). ## Settings * **Voice** — pick one from the list and use **Preview** to hear it before you ship. Three dropdowns above the list narrow it down by gender, language and style; they filter what you are choosing from, they are not settings in their own right. * **Spoken greeting** — an optional line the agent says when a call starts. Keep it to one sentence. * **Usage meter** — minutes used this month against your allowance. ## Same brain, different mouth Voice runs the same pipeline as text: your knowledge base, your instructions, your topic boundaries, your capabilities. It transcribes what the visitor said, runs the agent, and speaks the reply. Two things are deliberately different: * **Replies are shorter.** The agent is told to answer in one to three short sentences and never to read a URL aloud. That instruction sits after your custom instructions, so it survives them. * **Cards still work.** If the agent decides to show a lead form, a scheduler or a handoff during a call, it says so out loud and the card appears in the widget. Custom buttons are the exception — they appear in the transcript but are never spoken about. A visitor can end a call at any time and carry on typing; the transcript and any cards stay where they are. ## How it is metered Voice is billed in **minutes of active speaking time** — the visitor's speech plus the agent's, and nothing else. Silence, thinking time, network delay and dashboard previews do not count. It is metered separately from your conversation pool. A call that is already running is never cut off mid-sentence: the allowance is checked when a call starts, not while it is in progress. Growth and Scale can opt in to overage, with a budget you set, to keep voice working past the allowance. Full counting rules and allowances are in [Usage and limits](/docs/billing/usage-and-limits).