Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending the ClueCon developer conference in Chicago once again. ClueCon remains the go-to conference for professionals looking to influence the current RTC technologies. 2024 was no exception! It was an incredible experience, made even more special as we celebrated 20 years of ClueCon’s VoIP and telecom innovation.

As usual, the technical talks focused mostly on VoIP. However, a major theme was the rising role of AI in communications, with discussions highlighting how AI is transforming call centers and replacing or enhancing human agents. This was especially timely as our team at WebRTC.ventures has been doing a lot of work around AI integrations lately, and also recently launched our own AI-powered contact center solution, Conectara.

Day 1: Welcome

The event kicked off with the thrilling Coder Games, where creativity and competition took center stage using microcontrollers and similar hardware. In the Maker Challenge, attendees built battle cars for an epic balloon-popping showdown, testing their engineering skills in a high-stakes race. There also was the SignalWire Challenge, offering participants a chance to showcase their AI projects and compete for exciting prizes later in the week. I will write more about this in an upcoming post. 

I was unable to be there the whole day, but I did have some time to start a fun hack using SignalWire’s AI capabilities, which I promise to finish!

Day 2: The Talks Begin

Note: I did have to take some client meetings, so I was not able to get to every session. Here’s a rundown of some of the ones I did get to see.

Anthony Minessale kicked off the first day of presentations. Anthony is the Founder & CEO of SignalWire and the author of the open-source software defined telecommunications platform FreeSWITCH, created in 2005. In his talk he walked us through the 20 years of FreeSwitch story and how they built a software that was very innovative at the time and that today is used by many major companies like Amazon, Dialpad or Five9.

Diego Gosmar discussed Generative Conversational AI Interoperability and how OVON (Open Voice Network) enables seamless, open communication between voice assistants. He emphasized the importance of OVON Specs in creating a universal AI voice interface, highlighting its practical uses and future potential in conversational AI. You can read more about his paper here: Conversational AI Multi-Agent Interoperability Universal Open APIs for Agentic Natural Language Multimodal Communications (arxiv.org)

Luca Pradovera, who leads solution architecture at SignalWire, gave a compelling talk on empowering LLMs (Large Language Models) by providing them with structured knowledge. He explained the challenges of ingesting and processing existing documents and how SignalWire tackled these hurdles to bring the Datasphere component to market using open-source tools.

Later, Luca hosted a lunch and learn session on integrating SignalWire AI Agent with FreeSWITCH. He demonstrated how businesses with existing FreeSWITCH PBX systems can quickly integrate AI bots, reducing implementation time from months to just days—a powerful solution for those looking to enhance their communications infrastructure.

Day 3: Talks Continue

Fred Posner gave a talk on scaling the Kamailio SIP server and enhancing security, followed by Daniel-Constantin Mierla’s lunch session on Kamailio as a SIP Application Server, keeping this FreeSWITCH partner in the spotlight.

Diving deeper into the complexities of modern RTC monitoring architecture, Rita Lopes from QXIP shared her expertise on building telecom observability systems with Hepic Cloud v2. She focused on the challenges of implementing microservices and Kubernetes in the RTC space, a critical issue as more companies move toward cloud-based, dynamic architectures.

Shifting to the realm of political tech, Daniel Pocock discussed the impact of digital tools in European elections. His talk highlighted how these technologies are shaping the electoral landscape and touched on his policies concerning digital rights—an increasingly important topic in today’s interconnected world.

A standout moment came when VoIP pioneer, Jeff Pulver, and CTO of Strolid, Thomas Howe, introduced vCon (Virtualized Conversations), a new protocol designed to virtualize conversations across platforms. Their session offered a glimpse into the future of seamless communication in an increasingly virtual environment.

Rounding out the discussions, Liviu Chircu from the OpenSIPS Project delivered an in-depth presentation on 4G/5G IMS 3GPP support, showcasing the latest developments in OpenSIPS 3.5. Liviu’s session highlighted new features such as IPSec tunnel management and HTTP/2 support, reinforcing the continued evolution of open-source IMS and its pivotal role in next-generation communication networks.

Thanks for another fun and informative ClueCon conference!

The conference was more than just technical talks. From Giordano’s pizza to the lively cocktail reception, it featured vibrant social gatherings, including a special moment when we all got to sing happy birthday to ClueCon and, indirectly, the FreeSwitch open source project. We blew out the candles, indulged in some cake, and enjoyed a lively reception filled with music and karaoke. The room was buzzing with attendees sharing ideas, recounting past stories about open source, and even jamming with real guitars, or going virtual with Guitar Hero.

While sad to have missed poker night, ClueCon was still a fantastic experience to engage again with my colleagues who are shaping the future of communications. Looking forward to 2025!