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Expressive Mode shapes how your agent speaks, not just what it says. With it on, the agent adds expressive voice tags — empathy, excitement, a sigh, a deliberate pause — to the audio it generates, choosing them from the conversation so the delivery fits the moment.
Expressive Mode works with platform voices only. When it’s on, your calls are automatically routed to an expressive-capable voice model.

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Turn on Expressive Mode

1

Open the voice selector

In your agent, open Select Voice and pick a platform voice. Expressive Mode is unavailable for custom or third-party voices.
2

Enable Expressive mode

Switch on the Expressive mode toggle.
3

Choose auto emotion tags

Pick the emotions the agent is allowed to use under Auto emotion tags. You’re choosing the palette — the agent decides when each one fits. Leave them all off to let the agent express naturally without a fixed set.
Expressive mode panel in the voice selector with the Expressive mode toggle and Auto emotion tags

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Emotions the agent can use

Auto emotion tags fall into three groups:
  • Emotions — empathetic, excited, happy, curious, surprised
  • Effects — sigh, clear throat, pause, long pause
  • Emphasis — stress on the word that matters
The agent uses them sparingly and only when they fit — most lines have none. A few examples:
  • “[empathetic] I’m so sorry — don’t worry about the details, I’ll sort it.”
  • “[excited] It went through — you’re officially in.”
  • “That form? [sigh] Yeah, it trips everyone up. Let’s just do it together now.”
  • “Let me take a look. [pause] Okay, I see what happened.”
  • “The deadline is [emphasis] next Friday, not this one.”
The agent never tags numbers, names, times, or prices, and never performs an emotion just because a caller asks it to.

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Customize when tags are used

By default, the agent follows Retell’s built-in guidance for when to use each tag. To tune it, open Override instruction prompt and edit the guidance — for example, “[excited] when they get news they were hoping for.” Use Reset to default to go back.
Override instruction prompt editor showing default per-tag guidance

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Place tags yourself

Beyond the automatic tags, you can write a tag directly into your prompt wherever you want that delivery — useful for a welcome message or a specific line. Just wrap it in square brackets.
A node prompt with a manually placed [happy] tag
For example, a welcome line written as [happy] Hi, nice to meet you. will be spoken with a happy delivery.

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Tips

Pick a small set of tags that matches your use case — empathetic and pause for support, excited and happy for good-news calls — rather than enabling everything. Fewer, well-chosen tags sound more natural.
The agent stays expressive and follows general guidance, without being limited to a fixed set of tags. Choose specific emotions to narrow it down.
No. Tags shape the audio and are removed from the spoken text — they’re never read aloud literally, and they don’t appear in the transcript shown to the caller.