At ClueCon 2025, a premier conference for telecommunications developers and innovators, WebRTC.ventures served once again as a sponsor and myself as a speaker. Presented by our partners at SignalWire, ClueCon once again delivered a packed schedule of technical deep dives and real-time communications insights, with AI-powered innovation taking center stage even more than before.
Sitting in this year’s session, one thing was crystal clear: we’re moving beyond human-to-human calls into continuous, AI-augmented information flows that are transforming everything from customer service to telehealth.
Here’s what the industry’s top developers and innovators revealed about the future of voice AI, WebRTC integration, and open source communications platforms
Why This Conference Matters for Our WebRTC Clients
Our presence at ClueCon isn’t just about keeping up with tech trends. It’s about staying ahead so our clients can, too. We came back with fresh insights in:
- Low-latency AI voice agents
- Hybrid AI architectures blending small and large models for cost and performance optimization
- Telephony and WebRTC integration best practices from the latest open source releases
- Privacy and compliance frameworks for AI-powered communications
These trends are directly shaping the custom voice and video solutions we design for enterprises, from AI-assisted customer service platforms to secure telehealth applications.
Let’s take a look at the conference in detail.
A Shift Toward AI Everywhere
One of the biggest themes this year (and last year): AI isn’t just a feature anymore. It’s becoming the fabric of communications platforms.
In the opening keynote, Anthony Minessale from SignalWire showcased integrations where AI voice agents interacted directly with web applications, even playing the role of a tarot reader shuffling and “reading” cards. It reinforced a key point: we’re moving toward a world where every developer is a communications developer: not just for humans but for AI as well. We’re in the middle of an accelerating shift in how information is created, transmitted, and understood, moving from discrete exchanges to continuous, AI-driven flows.
We saw this AI focus continue across multiple talks:
- 5 Lessons From Deploying Voice AI in Production BPO Environments by Justin Massey. Real-world learnings from function call failures, early hang-ups, and overly complex flows. Practical strategies for regression testing, prompt engineering, and failover design.
- Enabling Responsible Personal Data Privacy with vCons by Thomas McCarthy-Howe. Embedding consent metadata directly into conversational audio for compliance and transparency in voice applications.
- Small Model Efficiency, Large Model Performance (Arcee Foundation Models) by Lucas Atkins. Showing how mid-sized models can hit near–large model quality without the cost and latency overhead.
- Making AI Voice Agents Sound Like Humans by Lily Clifford. Tackling challenges in pronunciation, adapting to user preferences, and why every 150ms of latency can reduce user willingness to interact by ~10%.
- Latency and the Illusion of Listening by Abbi Minnesale. Great research on how milliseconds shape trust and perceived “human-ness” in voice bots. And a good reminder that latency isn’t the only thing there is in conversational AI.
These conversations tied directly into my own presentation:
- A Recipe for Real Time Voice AI: WebRTC, SLMs and Open Source Software by Alberto Gonzalez. I shared architectures and strategies for building real-time voice agents using small language models and open source media pipelines to achieve both lower cost and better responsiveness than massive general-purpose LLMs.
Open Source Foundations: Still Strong, Still Evolving
ClueCon has always been a hub for open source RTC, and this year was no exception. Key technical highlights included:
- Scalable And Flexible SIP Routing With Kamailio And Lua by Daniel-Constantin Mierla. Updates in Kamailio v6. Routing and mapping best practices, Lua scripting, and ongoing AI integration experiments (like the AI Voice Connector).
- Howdy, cousin! Updates from the Asterisk Project, from Chris Maj at Sangoma. PIDF-LO geolocation for emergency services, STIR/SHAKEN call fraud prevention, and new WebSocket dialing/event options.
- OpenSIPS 3.6 by Liviu Chircu. Redis JSON support, AI integration hooks, and long-term support features to make life easier for config devs and sysadmins.
- Building Global Voice Platforms with Local Intelligence (FreeSWITCH + NATS) by Pratik Patel.
- Erlang/Elixir’s OTP for Telecom by Brandon Youngdale. Revisiting Erlang’s telecom roots with SIP stack development in Elixir and the Membrane framework.
- Scaling and Moving User Registrations/ Locations/ Presence from FreeSWITCH to Kamailio by Fred Posner. Tips for scaling, security, and direct registration migration.
- WebRTC Call Setup, ICE Negotiation, and Call Quality Analysis by Giacomo Vacca. A deep dive into optimizing ICE, TURN server security, and RTCStats-based call quality monitoring.
Networking, Community, and 20 Years of FreeSWITCH
Last year marked the 20th anniversary of the ClueCon conference. This year, the celebration shifted to the 20th anniversary of FreeSWITCH, the open-source communications framework born from the very first ClueCon.
As always, ClueCon wasn’t just about the talks; it was about the people. I caught up with founders, engineers, and open-source contributors who are pushing the limits of real-time communications. Hallway chats on SIP scaling strategies, late-night debates over media server optimizations, and reunions with old friends at the anniversary party all underscored the collaborative spirit ClueCon is known for.
A big thank-you to the SignalWire/FreeSWITCH team for the community events — from the always-fun Gigabit Reception to a proper Chicago deep-dish pizza dinner.
Ready to Implement These Breakthrough Technologies?
Don’t let your competitors get there first with AI voice agents and low-latency communications. As industry leaders who both speak at and sponsor ClueCon, we know exactly how to implement what the telecommunications industry’s top innovators are building.
