ClueCon Weekly with Hector Zelaya: Voice AI in Practice

This week on ClueCon Weekly, host Jon Gray sits down with Hector Zelaya, Developer Advocate at WebRTC Ventures — a SignalWire development partner specializing in real-time communication applications — to talk about what it actually takes to build and ship voice AI in the real world.

The voice AI pipeline, end to end. Hector walks through the full stack: client media transport, AI agent frameworks, and getting responses back in real time. His key point is that the scaffolding stays largely the same regardless of which model or platform you're running underneath — which means the architecture you build today survives the next model swap.

Debugging without burning credits. Hector shares how he uses SignalWire's test CLI to iterate on agents locally, avoiding the cost of hammering live endpoints every time he needs to check behavior.

From local models to the cloud — and back to the metal. He covers his journey from running AI models locally to leaning on cloud-based tooling, and why he's now looking at Rust and C to squeeze more performance out of hardware as RAM prices keep climbing.

About Hector
Hector Zelaya is a computer software engineer from El Salvador. He's worked as a software developer, DevOps engineer, and WebRTC specialist for over a decade, with a recent focus on integrating AI into his workflow.