We have studied the thermoelectric properties of thallium compounds as novel thermoelectric materials. Especially, we focus on the Ag-Tl-Te ternary system, in which we found that Ag 9 TlTe 5 exhibits an excellent thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT= 1.23) because of its extremely low thermal conductivity (around 0.22 Wm -1 K -1 ). In this paper, we studied the thermal conductivity of four kinds of ternary silver thallium tellurides: AgTl 3 Te 2 , AgTlTe, Ag 8 Tl 2 Te 5 and Ag 9 TlTe 5 , for which we found room temperature values of 0.39, 0.26, 0.14 and 0.21 Wm -1 K -1 , respectively. In order to understand the extremely low thermal conductivity, we performed an ultrasonic pulse echo measurement and evaluated some thermophysical properties.