Build your first agent

Say you have thirty minutes. The tab is open, nobody is calling, and you want to know whether this is real before you give up a Saturday to it. Here is the road, in order — meet an agent, talk to one, build your own, and put it somewhere useful — with the honest edges left in.

Meet one first

Start at the meet page. Ten agents, already at work — Caden on the front desk, answering before the second ring. Christina keeping a call list moving. Eli Syntax, happiest when the person on the other end is learning. Every face renders live in your browser right now, and each one started the way yours will: pick a face, give it a job.

Some agents share a cast face. The chip on each card says which one. The face is the uniform; the job and the voice belong to the agent.

Talk to one before you sign up

Now open the marketplace. Thirty-eight web agents across four pages, every card priced Free to try. The first page lists twelve, and most of them belong to real businesses: a pool service in Mission Viejo doing repair, remodeling and construction, a café in San Clemente serving breakfast and lunch since 1987, hybrid solar pool pumps engineered in Dana Point, a home inspector who spent twenty-five years as a licensed builder.

Pick one. The use door for Prestige Pool Services is a fair sample. No signup needed for a trial conversation, running on NetShow's own models. And the page tells you what it is showing you: the persona you can read is built from the agent's public identity, its name, role, and description. The full instruction set stays private and is served by reference only.

That line matters more than it looks. What is visible is visible. What is private stays private. You learn the platform's posture before you have handed over an email address.

The free account, and what it holds

The Studio is open to read before you sign up. The account is what gives you something of your own to build in. Create a free account — $0, no credit card — and here is exactly what you get:

• 1 agent
• 50 conversations a month
• 5 knowledge documents
• 3 skills
• web chat

That is a real first agent. It is also a ceiling, and you should see the ceiling now rather than in week three. Fifty conversations is fifty conversations — count your own week before you assume it fits. Five documents is your hours, your service list, your prices, your FAQ, and one more — then you are full. When the agent earns more room, the plans page carries the numbers, starting at $9 a month.

Name it, then teach it

Name the agent. Then teach it your business by loading those five documents.

It is worth being exact about what an agent knows, because this is where products overpromise. NetShow makes a smaller claim, and the smaller one is better.

Your agent knows what you selected and authorized. Nothing lands in its head by accident. What it knows is visible to you and source-linked, so when it quotes a price you can see which document that price came from. When it is wrong, you correct the document and the answer changes.

Access is revocable — pull a document and the agent stops drawing on it. Serious actions stay supervised, because an agent that can act alone is an agent that can be wrong alone. Changes are reversible.

A memory you cannot see is a memory you cannot fix. That is the whole argument. When your agent quotes a price you changed last spring, you do not argue with a black box. You open the file, correct the line, and the next conversation is verified against what you actually wrote.

Face, voice, and where it lives

Pick the face. The voice comes with the plan, and that is the next honest edge.

Here it is, in the same size type as everything else: the Free plan carries zero voice minutes, and so does Starter. Voice minutes begin at Creator, $29 a month, thirty minutes a month. On a free account your agent answers in text over web chat, the one channel the Free tier carries. That is not nothing — chat is what a first agent is for — but it is not a talking receptionist yet.

Then put it somewhere in your life. It runs in the browser, no install: homework help at the kitchen table, a greeter that answers a question at eleven at night. Two lines of code put it on your own website through the embed kit — one package, two lines to paste, and the avatar itself has no meter. Embed as a managed channel on your NetShow agent is a different thing, and it arrives higher up the ladder, at the Business plan, $149 a month.

What you end with is an agent with your name on it, five documents in its head, and web chat that answers in your words. Start there: create your free account.