Your website has been answering questions in writing for a year now. Starting today, it can answer out loud.
We just released Speakeasy™, the spoken side of the Xblu AI Assistant. A visitor taps a mic, says what they want, and your website answers in under a second, in a natural voice, on the same approved knowledge and personality you already gave the chat window. They can talk over it. It can look things up on your site while it’s talking. On a phone, it takes the whole screen. And it costs about a dime for a three-minute conversation.
Here’s what it is, why we built it, and what it changes about how people use a website.
Knowledge at your voice.
A more human way to get answers
Here is the honest version of why we built it: people would rather talk to a person. Nothing against AI, but a form is a chore and a chat window is still typing. So Speakeasy™ is tuned for the parts that make a conversation feel human: a warm voice, a personality with a mood and a point of view, the patience to be interrupted, and the sense to answer in a sentence instead of a page. It is not a person and never says it is. It just talks like somebody who likes their job and knows the answer.
It’s not a second chatbot. It’s the same one, speaking.
This matters more than it sounds. Most “voice bots” are a separate product with their own script, their own answers, and their own blind spots. Speakeasy™ is a plugin that plugs into the AI Assistant you already have. It uses:
- the same approved knowledge you wrote (hours, services, policies, the menu, the book),
- the same personality you picked (friendly, professional, playful, upscale or direct),
- the same site index, so it can search your pages mid-sentence and answer from the actual page,
- the same languages (English, Spanish, German, Polish), and
- the same Dashboard, so a spoken conversation lands right next to a typed one, with the page the visitor was on.
Set it up once. Two ways for people to use it.
Why voice changes engagement
A chat window asks people to write. That’s a small ask, but it filters out a lot of visitors: the ones on a phone with one hand free, the ones who type slowly, the ones who don’t know the right words for what they want, the ones who just don’t feel like it. A voice asks them to say what they mean, which almost everyone will do.
Two things happen when you make that change.
Questions get more specific. People don’t say “services.” They say “do you do metal roofs in Joliet, and roughly what does that run?” The assistant can actually answer that, ask the two follow-ups a good estimator would ask, and offer to set up a quote. The lead that comes in is better than the one that comes from a form.
Big information becomes small conversations. This is the one we’re most excited about. Some of our clients have an enormous amount to say: a 900-page book, a 40-page service catalog, a knowledge base nobody reads, a research site with hundreds of articles. Nobody consumes that top to bottom. Voice turns the whole thing into a back-and-forth. The visitor asks one question; it answers that one question, from everything, and tells them which page to read next. People stay, because they’re getting answers instead of looking for them.
One of the first sites running it is a historian’s research project, with a very large book and years of articles on navigation, sacred geometry and Southwest history. Its “Virtual Guide” page is just a large voice panel and the words ask the Guide. Visitors ask “why Pagosa Springs?” and get an answer that would have taken them an afternoon to find by reading.
What it feels like to use
A ring, a live wavelength, and your voice. We deliberately didn’t give it a face. When it’s listening, the wave moves in your color. When it talks, the wave is the sound, drawn from the actual audio. Captions run underneath so you can read along. A small timer shows how long the conversation has left, and you can tap the ring to interrupt, or just start talking, and it stops to listen.
Here is the sample from the product page. It uses your browser’s own voice so you can hear the flow without us spending anything; the real thing uses OpenAI’s live voice and sounds a great deal better.
Three places it can live
- A floating “Talk to…” button above your chat launcher. One tap, and on phones it opens full screen.
- A mic inside the chat window. Someone who started typing can switch to talking without losing the thread.
- A full page of its own. One shortcode gives you a large, always-on voice panel inside any page, post or Divi module. We use it for “Virtual Guide” pages, kiosks and ad landing pages.
Everything you can set
Ten voices. Speaking speed. Its name and what it says first. “Voice notes” that only the spoken assistant gets (“unhurried and a little wry”, “never give directions to the property”, “always mention the tasting menu”). Dark or light panel, dial ticks, corner marks, your accent color. Captions on or off. How long each conversation can run, how long a silence ends it, how long a pause before it answers, and whether visitors are on a headset or a laptop across the room. All of it on one settings page, most of it pre-filled from your AI Assistant.
Safe, metered, yours
Your OpenAI key never leaves your WordPress server; the visitor’s browser only receives a two-minute pass to open one conversation. You set a daily budget of voice minutes for the whole site and a per-visitor limit, and the budget is reserved before each conversation starts, so it’s a hard ceiling, not a suggestion. If a day runs out, voice pauses, you get one email, and the typed chat keeps working. It carries the same guardrails as the chat: business facts only from your approved knowledge, no guarantees, and “I’m not sure” instead of a guess.
On the standard model it costs roughly a cent a minute while the visitor talks and a little over two cents a minute while it talks. A typical three-minute conversation is about ten cents.
Getting it
Speakeasy™ needs the Xblu AI Assistant. If you already have the Assistant, Speakeasy™ is a second plugin and a settings page; we install it, pick the voice with you, tune the greeting and the budget, and hand you a page you can show your customers. If you don’t have the Assistant yet, we set both up together.
