Chatbase has added SIP trunk support for its AI voice agents, allowing a business to connect a phone number it already controls instead of provisioning a separate number for the service. The update is aimed at existing contact-centre and private branch exchange environments where changing a published number would be disruptive.
SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, is widely used to establish calls between internet telephony systems. Chatbase’s implementation gives an administrator a SIP address that can be used as the destination for an existing provider, PBX or GSM gateway.
The existing number stays at the front door
Setup begins under Deploy → Phone in Chatbase. After the number is added, the platform generates a SIP URI. The organisation then points its trunk towards that address, so incoming calls reach the Chatbase agent while customers continue dialling the familiar number.
Once connected, the agent answers with the voice, personality and knowledge already configured in Chatbase. That keeps the telephony connection separate from the agent’s instructions and content. A team can therefore update the agent’s knowledge or conversational behaviour without redesigning its carrier relationship.
The feature also gives larger operations a path to place Chatbase behind existing call routing. A contact centre may already have menus, queues, opening-hours rules and escalation paths in a PBX. SIP trunking can connect the AI endpoint to that environment rather than requiring the AI platform to replace every telephony component.
A short announcement leaves operational questions
Chatbase’s release note confirms inbound calling and names SIP providers, PBXs and GSM gateways as supported connection types. It does not describe outbound calling, warm transfers, codec support, concurrent-call limits, regional availability or the authentication methods accepted on the trunk.
Pricing is also absent from the announcement. Organisations will need to confirm whether SIP-connected minutes use the same rates and plan limits as numbers obtained through Chatbase, and whether their carrier charges separately for forwarding or trunk capacity.
Security configuration deserves particular attention because the SIP URI becomes an entry point to the agent. The source does not document network allow-lists, credential rotation, fraud controls or log retention. Those omissions do not mean the controls are unavailable, only that the changelog is too brief to establish them.
Voice agents can fit an existing call stack
The practical change is one of deployment flexibility. A business can test an AI agent on a branch, queue or after-hours route while keeping its public number and upstream carrier. That can make a staged rollout easier than porting numbers or rebuilding the full call flow inside a new vendor.
It also reduces lock-in at the number layer. The phone identity remains with the organisation’s provider, while Chatbase supplies an endpoint that can be changed in the trunk configuration. How portable the wider agent configuration is remains a separate product question.
The update is available now according to the 3 August changelog, but the release note offers no formal plan matrix. Before moving production traffic, teams will need the detailed SIP documentation and a test covering transfers, failure routing, call recording, privacy notices and load. Even so, support for existing numbers removes a concrete barrier for organisations that could not treat a new phone number as a disposable part of an AI pilot.