Voice Agents

Voice agents hold real-time spoken conversations — answering and placing phone calls, running support lines, and powering assistants — by stitching speech-to-text, an LLM, and text-to-speech together under tight latency budgets. The differentiators are conversational latency and naturalness, telephony and SIP integration, and how gracefully the agent handles the hard parts of real calls: interruptions, silence, background noise, and a clean hand-off to a human when it's out of depth. Sub-second response time is what separates a natural conversation from an awkward one, so scrutinize end-to-end latency, not just the quality of the underlying model. Evaluate the available voices, how well the system handles barge-in when a caller talks over it, and how it manages turn-taking and context across a long call.

Integration surface matters too: check telephony providers, warm transfer to human agents, function calling into your back-end systems, and analytics on call outcomes. Most platforms price per minute of conversation, bundling speech, model, and telephony costs, sometimes with a monthly platform fee on top — so model your real call volume before comparing headline rates. Test with your own scripts, accents, and edge cases rather than the vendor's demo, because voice quality degrades fastest exactly where real callers live: noisy lines, fast talkers, and unexpected questions.