Voice & Conversation
agents that don't sound like 2018.
Inbound and outbound voice agents with sub-400ms latency, native turn-taking, and escalation paths to humans in three rings or fewer. We handle the SIP, the eval, the prompts, and the transcripts.
Voice is a different problem than chat.
Latency dominates. Turn-taking is brittle. Barge-in breaks every naive pipeline. We've shipped enough of these to have opinions: realtime APIs first, streaming TTS where possible, and an escalation path that's actually rehearsed — not bolted on at the end.
What we actually build.
Realtime pipeline
Speech-to-speech via realtime APIs when accent, latency, and naturalness matter. Token-streamed TTS with mid-sentence interruption.
Turn-taking
Native VAD with prosody awareness; the agent learns when 'um' is a hold and when it's a release. Tunable per persona.
Barge-in
Fast user override. The agent shuts up within 80ms of detecting fresh speech. We've measured every alternative; this one wins.
Tool calls
The agent can read your CRM, your booking system, your knowledge base — mid-call. Latency budgets are explicit per tool.
Escalation
Warm transfers to humans, with the transcript and intent summary already in their headset. Three rings, max.
Eval & QA
Recorded calls, redacted, scored on completion, satisfaction proxies, and policy adherence. Drift surfaces in days, not quarters.
A peek at real output.
[00:06] caller "Yeah, my package — uh — said delivered but it's not here."
[00:11] acme-bot "Sorry to hear it. Can I get your order number?"
[00:14] caller "It's um, eight, two — wait, hold on…"
[00:19] acme-bot "Take your time." // hold-detected, no barge
[00:24] caller "Okay, A-7-2-2-5-1-9."
[00:27] → tool order.lookup(A722519) // 142ms
[00:28] acme-bot "Got it — that's a UPS shipment marked delivered
Tuesday at the front door. Did you check with
neighbors or a porch?"
[00:36] caller "Yeah, I — actually no, I want to talk to a person."
[00:39] → escalate tier=missed-delivery, ctx=A722519
[00:39] acme-bot "Of course — connecting you to Maya. One moment."
[00:41] → ring human-agent · 2.4 rings · accept