A voice agent that answers the phone is the easy 20 percent. The interesting 80 percent is everything the call is supposed to trigger: check the calendar, write the CRM contact, send the confirmation text, tag the hot lead. New developers building their first voice agent almost always try to cram that logic into the voice prompt, and it works in the demo and falls apart in production.
I build AI voice agents for US clients, and the question I get most from other devs is some version of "okay, the agent talks, but how does it actually do anything?" In my stack the answer is always the same: Retell handles the conversation, n8n handles everything the conversation triggers. This is the exact integration I ship, including the parts that break once real calls start hitting it.
The mental model: two webhooks pointing in opposite directions
Almost everyone overcomplicates this. The entire integration is two arrows:
Retell to n8n: the agent tells n8n what happened (call lifecycle events) and asks n8n questions mid-call (custom functions).
