—— SYSTEM-DIRECTED AI

Voice AI in production at
OVERVIEW
Where AI runs decides what breaks
When the AI runs inside of the call instead of across five vendors, you get clean logs, real control, and low latency.
OBSERVABILITY
You build agent behavior.
The platform handles the rest.
The platform handles state, timing, coordination, and infrastructure. You build AI agents and call flows without ever touching infrastructure complexity.
Conversational turn latency
SignalWire (avg of 5 configs)
range: 1.09-1.46s
1.24s
Vapi
1% faster thank LK baseline
1.85s
LiveKit (baseline)
0.89s spread
1.87s
Livekit (tuned)
0.38s spread
1.75s
Developer Toolkit
Everything you need to build smarter voice systems.
Every application you build runs on the same engine, keeps its own call state, and stays under your code's control.
Inbound & outbound agents
Answer incoming calls or place them at scale. The same agent code handles both directions, so you write the behavior once.
AI-to-human handoff
Escalate to a live rep with the full call context intact. The agent transfers the transcript, state, and caller details, so no one starts over.
Real-time translation
Translate both sides of a live call as it happens. Each party hears their own language with sub-second turns, on one connection.
SEE IT IN PRODUCTION
Steer the AI mid-call
Talk to Sigmond on the left. On the right is what controlling a live AI session looks like on the platform Sigmond runs on.
Talk to Sigmond
A voice AI that answers questions about SignalWire over WebRTC

Tap to talk to a live agent
2000+
Customers
2.7B
Annual minutes & messages
~1200ms
AVG AI turn
~800ms
Optimized Stack
Related Resources


FAQS
What's the difference between SignalWire's voice AI and Vapi or Retell?
Vapi and Retell are orchestration layers on top of four other vendors — Twilio for telephony, Deepgram for STT, OpenAI for the LLM, ElevenLabs for TTS. Their per-minute fee is on top of the underlying vendor costs. SignalWire owns the media stack, the AI kernel, and the carrier relationships in one platform. One bill, one operator, one place to call when something breaks.
Why is SignalWire's latency lower?
The AI kernel runs inside the same media stack the call lives in. STT, LLM inference, and TTS execute in the substrate, not over external HTTP round trips. The architecture eliminates the inter-system relay that adds 800-2000ms on bolt-on platforms. Measured turn latency averages ~1,200ms across tested configurations.
What does System-directed AI actually prevent?
Hallucinated actions the backend cannot honor. Unauthorized state transitions. Tool calls outside the current step's scope. Model access to data it was never meant to see. The governance is structural — the model doesn't know other tools exist, doesn't see the data layer, and can't override decisions enforced in code.
Can I use my own LLM?
Yes. The AI kernel is model-agnostic. OpenAI, Claude, open-source models on dedicated infrastructure, and native speech-to-speech models all run through the same interfaces. Switch models without rewriting the application.
What about speech-to-speech models like Nova Sonic and OpenAI Realtime?
Supported through the same kernel. New modalities arrive as configuration choices, not code changes. SignalWire's architecture was designed to absorb model evolution.
How does pricing work?
$0.16/min for the AI runtime, which includes speech-to-text, language model inference, text-to-speech, orchestration, state management, and governance. Transport (PSTN, SIP, WebRTC) is billed separately at carrier rates. No setup fees, no monthly minimums, no per-seat licenses.
Is the AI agent compliant for regulated industries?
The platform is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA-eligible with a BAA, and supports PCI DSS controls. The hidden data layer keeps sensitive fields out of model context structurally, not by prompt instruction. Compliance is enforced at the platform level.
How do I migrate from a Twilio + Vapi or Twilio + Retell stack?
SignalWire's cXML compatibility layer runs existing TwiML inside the control plane, so Twilio voice flows can migrate without rewrite. The voice AI portion replaces the middleware vendor. Migrate incrementally; new agent code uses the SignalWire Agents SDK.


