Yes, what you're seeing is expected, and it doesn't necessarily indicate a problem with the agent.
For basic voice-enabled agents, the Copilot Studio test pane can simulate voice behavior, but it doesn't provide a full speech-in/speech-out experience.
In the test panel, go to:
→ Chat mode → Speech & DTMF
This lets you test voice-specific behavior, but Microsoft's current documentation notes that speech recognition isn't supported in the test chat. The agent's speech response is displayed as text instead.
So there are effectively two different things to test:
- Conversation/logic → Test pane is fine.
- Actual microphone input and spoken TTS output → Test through the appropriate published voice channel.
Also, enabling Enable voice in the agent doesn't itself configure a voice channel. Microsoft specifically notes that the voice setting enables voice authoring capabilities; for a fully voice-enabled experience, the appropriate voice/telephony channel must also be configured.
One important distinction: if you're using the newer real-time voice agent experience, Microsoft now provides a different voice testing experience where you can actually speak to the agent and hear its responses. That test mode is separate from the basic voice-agent test experience.
So if your published channel already speaks correctly, I wouldn't treat the text-only behavior in the standard Copilot Studio test pane as an issue wi
