Teams Phone Agent Now Generally Available: Licenses, Limits, and Setup

On October 1, 2026, Microsoft announced on the Microsoft blog Teams that Teams Phone Agent was beginning its general availability rollout on that date. The Microsoft Learn documentation, however, lists September 30, 2026, as the general availability date for all customers. Teams Phone Agent entered the Frontier Public Preview on June 15, 2026.

Microsoft describes the Teams Phone Agent as an extension of theAuto Attendant, which engages in a conversation with the caller rather than presenting them with a touch-tone menu. The agent answers questions, schedules appointments, and routes the call to a person, a queue, or another switchboard. It is created in the same list as the Auto Attendants on the Teams admin center .

What's being released to general availability, and what's still in preview

The announcement on October 1, 2026, does not assign the same status to everything. The agent's core capabilities are generally available; two extensions are not.

Capacity	Status as of October 5, 2026
Answers to Questions Based on a Knowledge Base	General Availability
Making, Changing, and Canceling Appointments	General Availability
Transfer to a person or department, with AI-generated conversation notes	General Availability
Agent Tracking in the Queues App Supervisor Dashboard	Public preview
Voice agents built in Copilot Studio, via a relay or direct call	Frontier Program

Statistics retrieved on October 5, 2026, from Microsoft's announcement dated October 1, 2026.

The Queues app is part of Teams Premium, and every Queues app user needs a Teams Premium license. Voice agents Copilot Studio are billed separately, according to the usage-based pricing model at Copilot Studio.

Teams Phone Agent Licensing and Billing

The Microsoft Learn prerequisites page lists three requirements for the Phone Agent Teams :

• at least one Teams Phone license within the organization;
• one free Microsoft Teams Phone Resource Account license for each resource account;
• Copilot Credits and a spending strategy.

Billing is based on usage, in Copilot Credits. Microsoft notes that consumption varies depending on actual usage, including call duration and the resources used during the call. To estimate a budget, Microsoft refers users to its Copilot Credits Guide, while cautioning that actual consumption may differ from the estimate.

Teams Phone Agent is included in the list of pay-as-you-go services that the Microsoft 365admin center manages under Copilot > Cost Management. To target the agent’s resource account in a spending policy that applies only to certain groups, Microsoft requires that you first place it in a security group.

Integrations have their own prerequisites: Microsoft Bookings for appointments in Bookings, Microsoft Copilot Studio and its funding for custom voice agents, and Power Automate when the agent goes through a Power Automate flow.

Transfers to an external number follow the Auto Attendant rules. For numbers provided by Microsoft, the resource account must have a paid pay-as-you-go license, Communications credits, or—for a New Commerce customer—the Telco pay-as-you-go overage. With Direct Routing, it must have an online- voice routing s policy. With Operator Connect, nothing else is required.

Create a Phone Agent " Teams " in the Teams admin center

The path is the same as for automatic standards: Voice > Auto Attendants > Add, then “Teams ” Phone Agent. The “ Teams ” Phone Agent option is enabled by default in the wizard; disabling it reverts the settings to those of a standard “ Auto Attendant .”

There are three points in the assistant that require attention:

• Access is available only through a resource account. The option that places the agent behind another voice application, without a resource account, is not available for Teams Phone Agent, according to documentation reviewed on October 5, 2026. Therefore, each agent needs their own resource account.
• Description of the menu options. For each option, the “Description” field tells the agent when to use it, using the words a caller would use. The agent relies on this field to choose the option: the more closely the description matches the caller’s words, the better the call is routed.
• The Operator. Microsoft recommends setting one up and assigning it a menu key: without a key, the "Operator" voice command is also disabled.

The tools must be set up before the agent: Microsoft’s procedure assumes that the Questions and Answers and Appointments tools—as well as any Copilot Studio —agents—have already been created. The person to whom the agent transfers the call must have voice capabilities enabled.

Searching the directory is limited to one method per agent: searching by name or by extension number. To offer both options, Microsoft recommends enabling name-based search for the primary agent and providing an option to transfer the call to a second agent or a Auto Attendant where extension-based search is enabled.

Languages and voices: The local fr-CH and de-CH versions are supported

Teams Phone Agent supports 63 languages and locales. The list includes fr-CH and de-CH; for the third national language, it offers only the locale it-IT. The language configured on the agent is used for warning messages and when the agent does not recognize the caller’s language or cannot respond to the caller in that language.

Nine voices are available. None of them are optimized for the "fr" locale; Microsoft recommends the default voice, Ava, for all languages that do not have an optimized voice.

The welcome message is entered as text and can be written in multiple languages; the agent then speaks it in each language. Audio files are not supported for either the greeting or the menu, and the “Announcement” menu options—whether as audio files or text—are not available. The “Force listen” option is also unavailable. A switchboard that relies on recorded audio messages must therefore switch to text-to-speech.

AI alerts, call duration, unwanted calls: settings added since the preview

Several settings were introduced during the preview or with the general release. Some are still only available via PowerShell.

Adjustment	Where it happens
AI Warning Message: Keep, Customize, or Disable	Teams admin center
Maximum Call Duration and Disconnection Message	Teams admin center
Automatic Recording of Agent Calls	Teams admin center
See you at Microsoft Bookings	PowerShell
Detecting Unwanted Calls: Call Forwarding and Exception Lists	PowerShell

By default, the warning message announces a virtual assistant. Microsoft states that the agent provides the standard notifications required by law—including those regarding recording, transcription, and interaction with AI—and that any organization that disables these notifications becomes responsible for informing callers in real time, in accordance with applicable law.

The default maximum call duration is 4 minutes. Once this limit is reached, the caller hears the disconnect message and the call ends. Since the use of Copilot Credits depends in part on the call duration, this setting also affects the cost.

The detection of unwanted calls is enabled by default: the agent hangs up on calls he classifies as unwanted. A template created at PowerShell, by New-CsMainlineAttendantSpamDetectionTemplate, allows you to redirect calls to the operator and list numbers that are always or never classified as unwanted. If no operator is configured, the agent hangs up.

Features available only in " PowerShell " require the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module, version 7.9.1-preview or later.

The Knowledge Base: Public Pages, Unprotected Files

The Questions and Answers tools form the agent's knowledge base. Microsoft's limitations and recommendations influence what an organization can entrust to it:

• A maximum of ten files per tool, for a total of 5 MB;
• Public web pages only: no intranet pages or pages that require authentication;
• The agent reads the page specified by the URL and does not follow its links; it re-reads the URLs once a day;
• no document bearing a confidentiality label, a password, or a restriction under a security policy;
• files written, as recommended by Microsoft, in a single language—the one configured on the agent.

Microsoft also warns that conflicting information within the same tool can produce incorrect answers. The agent does not keep a copy of the documents; it retains an abstract representation of them.

Schedule an appointment: Microsoft Bookings or through a third-party system via API

Teams Phone Agent can use an existing shared booking page from Microsoft Bookings. The integration is configured at PowerShell, with New-CsMainlineAttendantAppointmentBookingFlow and the parameter -AppointmentBookingPlatform "MicrosoftBookings".

For another scheduling system, integration is done through publicAPI endpoints. Four are required: authentication, availability, scheduling, and viewing upcoming appointments. Modifying and canceling appointments requires two additional optional endpoints. Microsoft recommends placing Power Automate between the scheduling system and the agent.

Known Issues Identified on October 5, 2026

• To transfer from a Teams Phone Agent to another, from a Auto Attendant to a Teams Phone Agent, or from a Call Queue to a Teams Phone Agent, you must use a resource-based transfer: voice application-based transfers are not supported in these cases.
• When two agents both have automatic recording enabled, the greeting, AI warning, and recording announcement may overlap.
• Attempting to assign an auto-registration template while creating the agent fails: You must first register the agent, then edit it to add the template.
• The administrator Teams who assigns this template must also be a site administrator SharePoint used by the template.

Teams Phone Agent, Call Queues, and Third-Party Voice Agents

Teams Phone Agent answers and routes calls. When a caller needs to speak to someone, the agent transfers the call to a person or an Call Queue, and the queue then distributes the calls among the people handling it. Conversely, exception handling in a Call Queue can redirect calls to a Teams Phone Agent, allowing it to serve as an overflow for a human queue.

Microsoft is also opening up Teams Phone to voice agents from other vendors through the Teams Phone Unify Integration Model. These agents can answer calls, authenticate the caller, and pass the call context to the next destination Teams ; their licensing is handled by the vendor. In its June 18, 2026, announcement, Microsoft noted thatAudioCodes announced the general availability of its voice agent for Teams Phone on the same day.

Our Reading

Teams Phone Agent is worth implementing for an organization whose main line primarily receives repetitive questions with publicly available answers—such as hours of operation, an address, or a procedure—or requests for appointments: a medical practice, an agency, a retail business, or a local government office. For a line where most calls require handling specific to the organization—such as checking the status of an order or an account balance—a single agent is not enough: Microsoft routes these cases to voice agents Copilot Studio, also part of the Frontier program.

We wouldn’t place it right away in front of the main number. The first two locations that seem reasonable to us are the after-hours call flow and the overflow from an Call Queue when no one is available: callers who would otherwise reach voicemail get a response, and the organization can assess the agent’s quality and their use of Copilot Credits before proceeding further. Before launching the service, we would establish a spending strategy and a maximum call duration, and we would have a few real callers listen to the Ava voice in Swiss French, since no voice is currently optimized for that locale.

For a team that’s already using a contact center built on Teams —such as the one at Luware that we’re deploying— Teams Phone Agent does not replace that contact center. The question is rather which first point of contact answers the call, and this is determined by the percentage of calls that are resolved without human intervention. The rest of the Microsoft telephony features— Teams, Auto Attendants, Call Queues, and connection to the public network via Calling Plan — Direct Routing or Operator Connect, remains unchanged.

What to Check Before Enabling It

• One " Teams Phone" license for the organization, and one " Teams Phone Resource Account" license for each agent.
• Copilot Credits and a spending strategy; even if it targets only certain groups, the resource account of the agent assigned to a security group.
• The maximum call duration, either kept at 4 minutes or adjusted.
• The AI warning message—whether default or custom; if disabled, how callers are notified.
• The agent's local language, fr-CH or de-CH, and listening to Ava's voice during calls with real callers.
• Pages from the public knowledge base, files that are not marked as confidential or password-protected, and that do not contradict one another.
• Transfers to other agents, auto attendants, and call queues, configured by resource account.
• For an external transfer, the funded pay-as-you-go license, Communications credits, or the Telco pay-as-you-go overage for Microsoft numbers, or the online voice routing policy at Direct Routing.
• The Microsoft Teams modulePowerShell , version 7.9.1-preview or later, if Bookings or spam call detection needs to be configured.
• Teams Premium license for supervisors who will be using the Queues app.

For broader applications of artificial intelligence in customer relations, the page on artificial intelligence for customer service and contact centers outlines other options.

Microsoft Sources

• Engage customers with Teams Phone Agent and custom voice agents built into Copilot Studio (Microsoft blog Teams, June 18, 2026)
• Help your customers get answers and support with Teams Phone Agent (Microsoft blog Teams, October 1, 2026)
• Setup – Phone Agent for Teams
• Map – Overview of Teams Phone Agent, Auto Attendant, and Call Queue
• Technical Prerequisites and Licensing Requirements
• Limits and Supported Configurations
• Questions and Answers Tools (Teams Phone Agent)
• Appointment scheduling tools (Teams Phone Agent)
• Third-party voice agents
• Usage-Based Billing for Copilot Credits
• Managing AI experiences enabled by usage-based billing