Insights
Deep dives into voice AI technology, industry trends, and the future of conversational interfaces.
The Latency Budget of a Phone Call
Every platform quotes one latency number. A caller experiences a chain of eight stages, only two of which are the model. Where the milliseconds actually go, which ones are physics, and why turn detection usually costs more than time to first token.
Barge-in That Actually Works: Tuning VAD for Phone Audio
Voice activity detection settings tuned on clean studio audio fall apart on an 8 kHz phone line. The two jobs one detector is asked to do, the false barge-in and how to recover from it, and why we moved turn detection back out of the cloud.
EU AI Act Article 50: What Voice Agents Must Disclose
From 2 August 2026 a caller must know they are talking to a machine. What Article 50 actually requires of a phone agent, who carries the obligation, and why proving it is a job for the orchestration layer.
What a Voice AI Agent Really Costs Per Minute
Platform fees are the small half of the bill. A component-by-component breakdown of what a minute of AI phone conversation costs, where the hidden multipliers sit, and how to model it before you commit.
When the Transfer Fails: Handing a Call to a Human
Every voice agent demo transfers to a human on the first try. Production is not a demo. The failure modes of a warm transfer, why silent fallbacks are worse than a refusal, and what to build instead.
Why Voice Agent Calls Fail: Reading the SIP Logs
A dashboard that says 'error' tells you nothing. The four layers a phone call fails at, the SIP response codes and Q.850 causes that name the cause, and a triage order that converges instead of guessing.
Self-Hosted Voice AI: Who Holds the Pager?
Self-hosting a voice stack to escape per-minute pricing is a real strategy with a real bill attached, and the bill is mostly operational. What you take on the day you own the pager, and the three honest ways out.
Gemini Live 3.1 Prompting Guide (Voice Agents)
You can't prompt Gemini 3.1 Flash Live like a text LLM or a TTS engine. A practical prompting guide for native-audio voice agents: instruction design, tone, language, and what quietly fails.
Why Voice AI Needs European Infrastructure
Data sovereignty, latency, and compliance - exploring why European businesses need voice AI infrastructure that stays in Europe.