Voice AI Design
For Kollektor
Role
Product Design & Engineering
Period
2026
Skills Utilized
Overview:
Backstory of the work.
Kollektor is an AI phone agent for Turkish law offices and collection teams, now part of GBO Vision. It calls debtors in Turkish, verifies who it is talking to, explains the debt and works toward a clear payment promise, while the team's operators watch every call live and can take over at any moment.
I shaped the product's identity and the agent's voice, tuned the voice and model stack, designed the Turkish interface and its visual language, and led the move to a real-time backend in September 2026, working alongside an engineer who built the voice worker, flow builder, campaigns and softphone.
Tone.
Firm, never abusive.
A collection call is not customer service, and an agent that apologizes and thanks its way through it gets nowhere. I wrote the tone rules: short turns, consequences stated as facts rather than threats, concrete terms when the conversation stalls, and pressure without abuse.
An early version learned from about ninety sample lines and started rehearsing them, sounding scripted. I replaced the samples with principles, and the conversations became natural.
Sample data, translated from Turkish.
Guardrails.
Rules in the system, not the prompt.
The sensitive parts are enforced by the system instead of being left to the model. Identity is checked with only the last four digits of an ID, logs are masked, transcripts are deleted after 90 days, every call opens with a recording notice, nothing is shared with third parties, a do-not-call list is honored, and calls only go out Monday to Saturday between 09:00 and 20:00.
People stay in the loop: operators can listen to any call and take it over, and any action that writes data waits for their approval.
Imagery.
A person, not a robot.
For the product's imagery I art-directed AI-generated photography around an ordinary person on an ordinary call, with the agent shown only as a voice. The waveform went through several treatments, from dots to particles, before settling on the one that read as calm rather than technical.
The Impact.
Shipping & Outcome.
Kollektor handles live calls, with every conversation recorded, transcribed and visible to the team. The September move to a real-time backend carried over every agent, debtor and call, with more than 1,500 tests passing.
Designing for a hard conversation taught me that some of the most important design work in an AI product is deciding what the AI must never do, and making sure the system, not the prompt, enforces it.