AI Voice & Telephony — Real Calls, Real Agents
Voice is back — and not as IVR. We build AI voice agents that handle real customer calls end-to-end: appointment booking, support triage, outbound qualification — under 700ms latency, with the guardrails that keep them from going off-script on a recorded line.
- 1Audio inTelephony layer (Twilio/LiveKit) streams audio
- 2Speech → textStreaming STT (Deepgram, Whisper)
- 3LLM decideTool routing, RAG, guardrail check
- 4Tool / APICalendar, CRM, ticket system
- 5Text → speechStreaming TTS (ElevenLabs, Cartesia)
First-token latency under ~700ms is the threshold for 'feels like a person'.
What you get
When it fits
- You handle volume of repetitive calls (appointment booking, qualification, tier-1 support) and a human is overkill
- You can measure success: bookings completed, tickets resolved, calls handled without escalation
- Failure is recoverable — a missed booking can be re-confirmed, not a life-safety call
- You're willing to start narrow (one call type) and expand once the eval harness shows it's safe
When it doesn't
- The call type is emotionally sensitive (crisis, complaints, sensitive medical) — voice agents are wrong for that
- Volume is too low to justify the build — under ~5k calls/month a human team is usually cheaper
- Your phone system is proprietary and integration is closed — we can't bridge what we can't reach
Process
Week 1: call-flow design and tool contract definition. Weeks 2–3: latency-first prototype with one call type end-to-end. Weeks 4–6: guardrails, eval harness, and shadow mode against real calls (agent listens, doesn't act). Weeks 7–10: live with a small slice of traffic, scaling up behind a feature flag once the metric holds.
Full delivery processPricing
Fixed-price builds for first call type: $80–180k depending on integration surface. Quarterly pod engagement for expansion across call types. Per-call infrastructure cost (telephony + STT/TTS + LLM) typically lands $0.08–0.30/call at scale.
See engagement modelsFAQ
- How is this different from an IVR?
- IVRs use rigid menus and frustrate users. Voice agents understand free-form speech, ask clarifying questions, and call APIs to actually complete the task. The architecture is also entirely different — IVRs are a tree; voice agents are an LLM with tools.
- What about accents, hold music, and bad connections?
- All real-world problems we benchmark against. We run shadow mode (agent listens, doesn't act) on a slice of your real call traffic during weeks 4–6, so we measure performance on your customers — not on staged test calls.
- Can the agent escalate to a human?
- Yes, and gracefully — warm transfer with context, not 'connecting you now' followed by silence. We design the human escalation path as a first-class flow, not a fallback, because that's where most voice projects fail.
- Is this TCPA / GDPR / two-party consent compliant?
- It is by design — disclosure scripts at call start, consent capture, recording retention rules, and DNC integration are part of the build. We'll review against your specific jurisdictions and industries in discovery.