Salesforce is adding voice to its Agentforce software, letting clients go beyond text when using artificial intelligence agents to respond to customer questions.

With Agentforce Voice, companies can customize the tone and speed of voices and adjust the pronunciation of specific terms, Salesforce said Monday, ahead of its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. The feature also allows people to interrupt the AI agent during phone calls.

Voice is becoming a bigger part of the generative AI boom, which started with text-based prompts in late 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. In the past year, OpenAI and Anthropic have enabled their chatbots to conduct spoken conversations without sounding overly robotic. Now that capability is taking hold inside business software.

Agentforce Voice will integrate with corporate phone systems from Amazon, Five9, Genesys, Nice and Ericsson’s Vonage.

Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor is also trying his hand in the market. Taylor helped start Sierra in 2023, and last year the startup announced that its AI agents “can now pick up the phone.” Sierra has been valued at $10 billion, and has a client list that includes ADT, SiriusXM and SoFi.

Salesforce has been under pressure this year in part due to investor concern that software companies could lose business as AI moves deeper into coding. The stock is down about 28% so far in 2025, while the Nasdaq has gained around 15% over that stretch.

Anthropic told reporters in September that its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model built a chat app similar to Salesforce’s Slack in 30 hours. In Salesforce’s latest earnings report, the company warned that new AI products “may disrupt workforce needs and negatively impact demand for our offerings.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has downplayed the risk to this company.

“When we get into this kind of zero-sum game, well, all this is going to get wiped out, or all this is going to change, then, you know, you’re not dealing with somebody who actually runs a company, because that’s not the way business works,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan last month. “Business is incremental, it’s evolutionary, it’s growing, it’s evolving, and we don’t see that kind of change.”

Salesforce launched Agentforce last year as a service that could respond to customer requests over text chats with help from generative AI models. Agentforce now has more than 12,000 implementations, according to a statement. But there’s some skepticism about its popularity.

“Investor enthusiasm around Agentforce has moderated as adoption has lagged expectations,” RBC Capital Markets analysts, who recommend holding the stock, wrote in a note to clients last week.

In November, Salesforce will provide early access to Agent Script software, which organizations can use to customize what agents say and do.

WATCH: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on what the market is getting wrong about AI

Chip stocks bounced on Monday, clawing back losses from Friday’s market rout as OpenAI announced another computing deal with a major chipmaker and U.S.-China tensions eased.

OpenAI and Broadcom announced a deal to develop custom artificial intelligence chips. The Sam Altman-led startup has recently inked agreements with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

Broadcom shares bounced 9% on the news.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump tried to calm worries about China in a post on Truth Social, saying it “will all be fine.”

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF jumped nearly 4%, while Nvidia and AMD rallied more than 3% each. Taiwan Semiconductor and On Semiconductor jumped about 6% each, while Micron Technology rose over 4%.

Trump sent markets into a selloff on Friday after he threatened massive tariffs on China in response to the country’s latest clampdown on rare earths. He later pledged to levy new tariffs of 100% on China imports starting on Nov. 1 and would also impose export controls on “any and all critical software.”

The tech megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap on Friday.

Charlie Kawwas, president of the semiconductor solutions group at Broadcom, on Monday said that OpenAI is not the mystery $10 billion customer that it announced during its earnings call in September.

Kawwas appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk on The Street” with OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman to discuss their plans to jointly build and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom artificial intelligence accelerators.

The deal was largely expected after analysts were quick to point to OpenAI as Broadcom’s potential new $10 billion partner. But after the companies officially unveiled their plans on Monday, Kawwas said OpenAI does not fit that description.

“I would love to take a $10 billion [purchase order] from my good friend Greg,” Kawwas said. “He has not given me that PO yet.”

Broadcom did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for additional comment.

OpenAI has been on an AI infrastructure dealmaking blitz as the company looks to scale up its compute capacity to meet anticipated demand. The startup, which is valued at $500 billion, has inked multi-billion dollar agreements with Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia and CoreWeave in recent weeks.

Broadcom does not disclose its large web-scale customers, but analysts have pointed to Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance as three of its large customers. During its quarterly call with analysts in September, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said a fourth large customer had put in orders for $10 billion in custom AI chips.

The order increased Broadcom’s forecast for AI revenue next year, which is when shipments will begin, Tan said during the call.

OpenAI and Broadcom have been working together for the last 18 months, and they will begin deploying racks of custom-designed chips starting late next year, the companies said Monday. The project will be completed by 2029.

“By building our own chip, we can embed what we’ve learned from creating frontier models and products directly into the hardware, unlocking new levels of capability and intelligence,” Brockman said in a release.