Teams Phone Agent gives Microsoft Teams admins a way to move beyond a fixed auto attendant menu. Instead of asking callers to press 1 for sales or 2 for support, the agent can listen to natural language, answer common questions, route callers, and hand specialized requests to a Copilot Studio voice agent.
That last part matters. A Teams Phone Agent is configured from the Teams admin center, but Copilot Studio is where you design the business workflow behind a specialized voice experience. For example, you might let callers check order status, ask about appointment availability, or get routed to a billing workflow before a human call queue is involved.
Before you start, treat this as a preview deployment. Microsoft currently lists Teams Phone Agent as available only to Frontier Public Preview customers. If the toggle or Teams Phone channel is missing in your tenant, the issue is likely availability, licensing, or preview enrollment.
What you need before building it
Start with the phone side. Your tenant needs Teams Phone capability, a resource account for the voice app, and an inbound number if callers outside Teams must reach it. Resource accounts for auto attendants and call queues are disabled for sign-in and can be assigned phone numbers, but they are not normal users.
Then check the agent side. You need access to Copilot Studio, funding for Copilot Studio usage, and a maker who can create and publish an agent in the right environment. If your Copilot Studio agent needs enterprise data, decide early whether it will use SharePoint, Dataverse, a public website, or connectors. Knowledge sources are useful, but voice callers need concise responses, so do not expose a broad document library without testing the spoken answers.
If you are still learning agent design, review a simpler chat-based build first. This EasyTweaks guide on how to build a Copilot Agent for Outlook email workflows is a good reference for the basic Copilot Studio pattern before you connect it to a phone flow.
Build the Copilot Studio voice workflow first
Create the agent in Copilot Studio before you wire it into Teams Phone. Give it a narrow job, such as “answer billing questions and route urgent billing calls.” Avoid making the first version a general receptionist for every department, because voice experiences fail quickly when the agent has too many possible intents.
Use these checks while you build:
- Write instructions that say what the agent can do, what it must not answer, and when it should escalate.
- Add only the knowledge sources needed for the phone scenario.
- Keep answers short enough to be spoken naturally.
- Test with caller-style phrases, not perfect admin prompts.
- Add escalation language for requests the agent cannot complete.
For a public preview phone agent, your safest first workflow is usually a question-and-routing flow. Let the agent identify the caller’s need, answer straightforward policy questions, and route to a person or queue when the answer affects money, identity, legal terms, or commitments.
Publish it to the right channel
The Teams Phone integration depends on the Copilot Studio agent being published to the Teams Phone channel. Microsoft documentation says Copilot Studio custom agents published to the Teams Phone channel automatically appear in the Teams Phone Agent Agents and Queues list.
Do not confuse this with publishing an agent only for standard Teams chat or Microsoft 365 Copilot. A Teams chat agent can be useful for employees, but it does not by itself make the agent available for inbound phone call routing.
After publishing, run a test session in Copilot Studio. Ask the same question several ways:
- “I need to change my appointment.”
- “Can someone help me with billing?”
- “I want to speak to a person.”
- “What are your opening hours?”
The goal is not to make the agent answer everything. The goal is to prove that it gives a short answer when it has grounded information and escalates cleanly when it does not.
Create the Teams Phone Agent in Teams admin center
Open the Teams admin center, then go to Voice > Auto attendants > Add. Microsoft documents Teams Phone Agent setup inside the Auto attendants area, but you must use Advanced setup. Quick setup does not configure Teams Phone Agent.
In the general information step, enter a clear name, enable the Teams Phone Agent toggle, and choose how callers reach it. Use a resource account if the voice app needs to be called directly. Use the voice app option if this agent is nested behind another Teams Phone Agent, auto attendant, or call queue.
Pick the language and voice carefully. The language is also the fallback language for the disclaimer if the spoken language is not recognized or the agent cannot use the caller’s language. Microsoft also notes that voice inputs are automatically enabled when Teams Phone Agent is enabled.
Configure greeting and hours
Set business hours before you design the routing. If you leave the default, business hours are usually treated as 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and anything outside that range follows the after-hours flow.
For the greeting, keep it plain:
- Say what the caller reached.
- Tell them they can speak naturally.
- Avoid listing every department.
- Keep compliance wording separate from marketing language.
Microsoft documents that Teams Phone Agent always plays an AI assistant disclaimer after the greeting. Do not try to hide that with a long welcome message. A short greeting makes the disclosure easier to hear and makes the first caller response cleaner.
Attach the Copilot Studio agent under Agents and Queues
In the call flow step, choose Play menu options when you want Teams Phone Agent to engage. Under the available destinations, use Agents and queues to connect callers to a Copilot Studio agent or another voice agent option.
For each route, fill in the voice command and description like an intent definition, not like a menu label. A weak description is “Billing.” A stronger description is “Use this when callers ask about invoices, payment status, refunds, charges, subscription billing, or billing department contact.” The agent uses that extra detail to decide when a caller belongs in that workflow.
Keep at least one human escape route. Configure an operator or a call queue for cases where the caller asks for a person, the agent cannot classify the request, or the workflow reaches a sensitive step. This is especially important while the feature is in preview.
If your Teams deployment also uses meeting and collaboration agents, keep the naming clear. A Teams Phone Agent handles inbound calling. It is not the same as a meeting assistant, such as the setup covered in this EasyTweaks article about how to add Copilot Facilitator to a Teams meeting.
Test before you share the number
Run test calls before moving real callers. Test during business hours, after hours, and with phrases that do not match your menu labels. You are looking for three outcomes:
- The agent answers common questions with short, grounded responses.
- The agent sends specialized requests to the correct Copilot Studio workflow.
- The agent transfers to a person or queue when the caller asks, fails authentication, or leaves the supported scenario.
Also test external transfer rules. Microsoft changed outbound PSTN licensing requirements for auto attendant and call queue scenarios on November 1, 2025. If your design transfers calls to external phone numbers, callbacks, or on-behalf-of calling scenarios, check the current funded pay-as-you-go, communications credits, Direct Routing, or Operator Connect requirements before relying on that route.
Practical troubleshooting
If the Copilot Studio agent does not appear in Agents and Queues, confirm that it was published to the Teams Phone channel, not just Teams chat. Then confirm the tenant is in the Frontier Public Preview and that the maker used the correct Copilot Studio environment.
If callers are routed to the wrong workflow, improve the route descriptions and add example phrases. If spoken answers are too long, narrow the knowledge source and rewrite the agent instructions for voice-first replies. If callers cannot reach the agent from outside Teams, review the resource account, phone number assignment, and inbound number type.
What to do next?
Build the first version as a small, measurable phone workflow. A good pilot answers a narrow set of questions, routes to one or two departments, and escalates quickly. Once the call logs and user feedback show that the routing is reliable, add another Copilot Studio workflow or connect the agent to appointment and queue scenarios.
The key is to separate the two jobs. Teams admin center controls how calls enter, greet, route, and transfer. Copilot Studio controls the specialized voice workflow. When both are scoped tightly, Teams Phone Agent can become a practical front door for callers.