Why People Hang Up on AI Calls in India: 2,053 Call Transcripts Analysed

They ask, and the call stalls. In 7.4% of all calls the person had to ask who was calling or what the call was about: "kahan se bol rahe ho?", "which company?", "kis cheez ka payment?". The worst cases were payment reminders that stated an amount and asked for a date without saying what the money was for. Callers answered with a question, or with "mera koi paisa baaki nahi". Reminders that named the invoice or product went straight to a date ("pachchis tareekh tak", "kal kar denge").

In 9.6% of calls on free-trial accounts, and 4.5% of all calls. These are template leftovers that a person reading the script would skip but a voice agent speaks word for word: "[Company Name]", "[BRAND NAME]", an empty "{{}}", "Good morning/afternoon/evening", "Sir/Ma'am", "bol raha/rahi hoon". Bad contact data caused the same effect. An empty name cell exported from a spreadsheet became "Am I speaking with nan?", and one list had phone numbers in the name column, so the agent read the digits out as the person's name.

Trial agents that leaked lost 39% of callers within their first two replies, against 18% for trial agents that didn't, and the gap held with each business weighted equally. But inside the same business, calls with and without a leak ended about the same way. The leak is a marker: an agent nobody read through before launch tends to have weaker questions, missing facts and a vague opener too. Fixing placeholders is the cheapest check; reading the whole script is the real fix.

Vyora's agent editor and campaign upload now flag these before a call goes out. The full list of mistakes, and how to fix each, is in 9 AI voice agent prompt mistakes.

It promises to call back. 11.7% of trial-account calls, and 5.2% of all calls, included a line like "main check karke update karungi" or "I'll have the team follow up" in reply to a straightforward question: package prices at a clinic, available interview slots, why a delivery was late. The voice and language were fine. The agent simply had no facts to work with. These questions are predictable, so the fix is a short FAQ or knowledge base with the 10 questions customers actually ask, and a human transfer for the rest.

Hinglish, whatever the agent speaks. On free-trial accounts Hindi agents ran 61% of calls and English 20%, with Telugu, Marathi and Tamil making up most of the rest. Across all accounts English led at 58%, because larger paid campaigns ran in English. Callers mixed freely either way: "Ma'am EMI kal bhijwa dunga", "Budget hoga tees hazaar aur starting date October se". 26% of all calls, and 40% of trial calls, had code-mixed agent speech too.

The calls that went wrong were language mismatches, not mixing: a Marathi greeting on a Hindi agent, a Bengali opening followed by Hindi questions, a Telugu prompt typed in Roman letters. Several callers asked to switch mid-call ("Can we talk in Hindi?", "Telugu language"). Agents that offered a language choice up front kept them. For how this works across eight languages, see AI voice agents in Hindi, Hinglish and Indian languages.

11% of callers' first words were a bare "Hello?" (15% on trial accounts). That usually means the agent started its intro before the person had the phone to their ear, or spoke over the pickup, so the opening line was lost and had to be repeated. Two related patterns showed up less often but recurred: "Are you still there?" firing a few seconds into a pause, and the agent repeating the same sentence twice in a row. A short pause before the intro and a sensible silence timeout fix most of it.

Period. 9 August to 8 October 2026.

Population. Outbound calls on Vyora with a transcript of at least three conversational turns: 2,053 calls from 325 businesses, 753 of them from free-trial accounts. Vyora's internal accounts are excluded. Trial accounts include first-draft agents and test calls to colleagues. Answer rates for campaigns are in our Q3 2026 campaign report.

Definitions. "Hung up within 2 replies" means the person called ended the call after speaking no more than twice. "Commitment" means the agent proposed a time, date, visit, demo or booking and the person replied with a specific time or day; it is matched by keyword, so read it as directional. "Placeholder leak" means the agent said bracketed text, an empty or malformed variable, a slash alternative like "Sir/Ma'am", or "nan" for a name.

Anonymisation. Only aggregates are published. Quoted phrases are short, common expressions with no names, numbers or brands. A figure is shown only when it covers at least 30 calls and 5 businesses, and no single business makes up more than half of it.

Robustness. Every comparison was checked across two 30-day halves, with each business weighted equally, and within businesses where possible. We report an effect only if it survived those checks. A first pass on 30 days of trial calls showed company-named openers converting far better; it did not survive, so we report no conversion effect.

Limitations. Correlation, not causation: businesses chose their own scripts and lists. Speech-to-text can mishear, especially in Tamil, Telugu and Bengali.