The annual ClueCon conference founded by the creators of FreeSWITCH has always been where the real-time communications community gathers to share what’s working, what’s breaking, and what’s next. This year’s edition, August 10-14 at The Midland Hotel in Chicago, made one thing unmistakably clear: AI is no
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:
In the space of thirteen months, Google took real-time speech translation from an English-and-Spanish demo at I/O 2025 to Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, a 70-language streaming model announced in June 2026 and now expanding into Google Meet through private preview, on top of the five-language version already
Voice AI tooling broadly falls into two categories: managed platforms that get you a production agent fast, and custom-built frameworks that give you full ownership of your voice pipeline. Within each category, the specific tools differ in ways that are worth understanding before you commit engineering time
