Welcome
Parrot puts an AI on a real phone line — your phone line. Your phone connects over Bluetooth like it would to a headset, and the AI speaks and listens on the call:
- An assistant answers or dials for you. Book the table, chase the delivery, sit through the pharmacy's hold music — and hand you the transcript, a summary, and the confirmation number it collected.
- You watch and steer from the console. See the conversation live, type "ask about parking too," read the full report afterward.
- Your AI agent gets a phone. Connect Claude (or any MCP-capable agent) and it can place calls, answer incoming ones, and handle mid-call questions — as ordinary tool calls, on exactly one line you gave it a key for.
Because Parrot sits on your actual phone via Bluetooth, there's no new phone number, no carrier setup, no porting — your line, your caller ID, with an AI attached.
Choose your connection
| Windows App (recommended) | ESP32 board | |
|---|---|---|
| You need | A Windows 11 PC with Bluetooth and your phone | A classic ESP32, USB data cable, your phone and desktop Chrome on Windows, macOS or Linux |
| Calling support | Phone calls and compatible app calls, including Messenger | Phone calls and compatible app calls |
| Keep running | Parrot App, with the PC awake and online | ParrotBridge in Chrome, with the computer awake and online |
| Start here | Windows setup · Download | ESP32 quickstart |
Both setups keep your number and SIM and require no app on your phone. For app calls, your phone must route the call audio through the Bluetooth hands-free connection to the paired PC or board. See Windows compatibility. The board, firmware and browser-bridge guides cover the ESP32 path.
How Parrot compares to Vapi, Retell & friends
Cloud voice-AI platforms (Vapi, Retell, Bland…) are excellent at what they are: they rent you a new VoIP phone number in the cloud and put an AI on it. Parrot starts from the opposite end — it puts the AI on the phone line you already have:
| Cloud voice-AI (Vapi, Retell…) | Parrot | |
|---|---|---|
| The phone line | A new VoIP number they provision | Your existing phone & number, via Bluetooth |
| Caller ID / inbound | The new number; you forward or migrate | Your number — people who already call you reach your AI with zero migration |
| Setup | API/dashboard only | Install Parrot App on Windows, or flash an ESP32 board, then connect your phone |
| Live agent control | Mostly configure-then-launch | MCP-native: your agent watches the transcript live, steers mid-call, answers the AI's questions, presses IVR keys |
| Taking over | End the call, call back yourself | Tap the audio picker on your phone — the call moves from AI to you mid-conversation |
| AI vendor | Their model roster | OpenAI / Ultravox / Gemini per assistant, your own key if you want |
Same family of post-call output — transcript, recording, outcome classification, AI summary, structured field extraction — so if you know that world, After the call will feel familiar. The honest flip side: Parrot needs your computer awake and online, with Parrot App or the ParrotBridge tab running, where a cloud number is always-on. If you want a fleet of disposable outbound numbers, a cloud platform is the right tool; if you want your phone to have an AI, that's Parrot.
The five-minute mental model
Five words you'll see everywhere in the console:
- A device is one phone line — your phone connected through Parrot App or an ESP32 board and its ParrotBridge tab.
- An assistant is the recipe for a call: what to accomplish, how to sound, which AI vendor runs the voice. Your device starts with a ready-made one; you can customize or replace it.
- A provider is the AI vendor line an assistant runs on — Parrot's shared key, or your own.
- A call is one conversation, and every call leaves a full record — transcript, audio, outcome, summary, extracted data.
- A key is an ordinary API key that connects an outside agent to exactly one device.
The console's sidebar groups these the same way: Observe (devices, call history), Configure (assistants, AI providers), Govern (API keys, account, billing).
The map
For the ESP32 setup, the console draws this path on each device's page. The hardware chapters follow this map:
| Hop on the path | Where it's documented |
|---|---|
| Parrot Cloud — the call engine, assistants, AI vendors | Making & receiving calls · Customizing your assistant · AI providers · Connect your AI agent |
| Parrot bridge — the browser tab hosting your line | The bridge |
| Parrot device — the board and its firmware | Your board & firmware |
| Bluetooth → your phone — pairing and the HFP link | Your phone & the HFP link |
| The phone call — what happened on it, afterwards | After the call |
| Watching the whole path at once | Your devices |
The two places you actually do things
The wiki explains; these two pages are Parrot. Both live on this same site, so you can go straight there and come back:
- Open the console — your devices, call history, assistants, providers, keys, billing.
- Open the Parrot Bridge — set up a board and host its line (Google Chrome on a desktop; it talks to the board over Web Serial).
Where to start
New to Parrot? The FAQ covers phone numbers, calling apps, hardware, the browser bridge and connecting your AI agent.
Have a board in hand? The Quickstart takes you from unboxing to your first AI call in about fifteen minutes — flash it, pair it, call something.
Already set up?
- Your board & firmware — what board to buy, flashing, the bootloader, the phone link (pairing, HFP, DTMF, audio routing), versions & updates.
- The bridge — the tab that hosts your line: status tiles, keep-it-open rules, reconnecting, updates, and error codes.
- Your devices — check on a line, read its health.
- Making & receiving calls — dial from the console, handle incoming calls, steer or listen to a live one.
- After the call — transcripts, reports, extracted data.
- Customizing your assistant — prompts, voices, variables, test calls.
- AI providers — run calls on your own vendor key.
- Connect your AI agent — give your agent the phone and let it build and save reusable assistants.
- Billing, credits & API keys — balance, usage, limits, keys.
- Security & trust — keys, board identity, what's protected.
- REST API reference — script the console's HTTP API.
Questions and fix-its live where you'd hit them — every chapter carries its own collapsed question and troubleshooting boxes.