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Guard rails continuously analyze every AI and user response during production calls. They catch severe failure modes like discrimination, self-harm encouragement, or compliance violations before they cause damage.

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Why Guard Rails Matter

When running thousands of AI calls, edge cases aren’t a question of if but when. Manual review doesn’t scale - if you’re running 50,000 calls a week, you can’t have humans listening to every conversation in real time. Legal exposure adds up fast:
  • A single discriminatory statement during a hiring call can trigger an EEOC complaint
  • TCPA violations carry statutory damages of $500-$1,500 per call
  • Class action lawyers actively monitor for these violations
Brand damage is hard to recover from:
  • A call where your AI mishandles someone in distress can go viral
  • These failures often happen in edge cases your testing didn’t cover
Centralized compliance saves time:
  • Update a compliance rule once and it applies everywhere instantly
  • No need to modify 30 pathways individually when regulations change
Guard rails also help with stakeholder management. Your legal team gets confidence that even in scenarios nobody anticipated during testing, there’s still a safety net catching dangerous outputs.

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Two Types of Guard Rails

The guard rail must be triggered within a specified time window, otherwise the configured action runs.Used for TCPA disclosures that must happen early in the call:
  • AI disclosure - Must disclose the caller is speaking with an AI
  • Self introduction - Must identify who is calling
  • Recording disclosure - Must disclose the call is being recorded
Default time window is 30 seconds (configurable via API).
The conversation content must not trigger the guard rail. These continuously monitor the conversation.Used for:
  • TCPA opt-out handling
  • Custom guard rails
  • Content policy violations

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Apply guard rails

You can apply guard rails to:
  1. Personas - under “General” -> “Policy & Compliance”
  2. Pathways - under “Policy & Compliance” in the pathway splash page
  3. Inbound numbers - under “Advanced” -> “Guard Rails”
  4. Any outbound call via API - including the guard_rails field in the POST /v1/calls API

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Actions When Guard Rails Fire

When a violation is detected, set actions will execute automatically:
  • End call - Immediately terminate the conversation
  • Transfer to human - Route to a live agent
  • Move to node - Jump to a specific node in your pathway (e.g., apology node, handoff node)

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Enterprise Custom Guard Rails

Enterprise customers can create up to 5 custom guard rails for industry-specific concerns/company policies. These are configured in the Enterprise Dashboard Compliance Settings. When creating a custom guardrail, ensure the prompt is clear, specific, and well-defined. Ambiguous prompts can cause false positives, flagging calls that shouldn’t be triggered. Once you’ve written your prompt, you can backtest it across multiple calls to verify it triggers, or doesn’t trigger correctly. Each run shows the reasoning behind the result, making it easy to spot issues and refine the prompt. Once satisfied, you can save the guard rail and apply it to any persona, pathway or inbound number.