WebRTC and SIP both carry live voice to an AI agent. Voice AI platforms list them side by side, so teams building an AI receptionist often expect to pick one or the other for connecting callers to the agent. In practice, each protocol serves a different way
SIP and RTP feed a call and its media into a voice AI pipeline. What happens next runs through the control plane: what the voice agent is told, and what it decides to do about it. In my talk at ClueCon this year, From SIP to Tokens:
Voice AI systems generate more than recordings and transcripts. Every production interaction produces a web of artifacts across multiple systems: call-setup metadata, ASR output, LLM responses, tool calls, CRM updates, escalation events, and compliance-relevant signals like caller identity verification. Most Voice AI architectures store some of these.
Porting your business phone number to add AI call handling is an operational risk most companies don’t need to take. Your number may be tied to other services. Your carrier contract may have obligations. And if something goes wrong mid-port, customer calls go nowhere. SIP forwarding sidesteps
