What Happens When Voice AI Builders Meet
This past week, I got to do something really cool.
Bluejay, Telnyx, and AssemblyAI got together for an evening of honest conversation about where voice AI stands today.
The room was full of people who are obsessed with what they're building. Founders, engineers, developers, who are all trying to solve the same hard problems from different perspectives.
Here's what the room was talking about:
"Nobody is actually calling from a quiet room"
One of the first things that came up was background noise. It sounds simple, but it's one of the hardest problems in voice AI. Most benchmarks test models in clean, controlled environments, but real users are outside on AirPods with cars and ambulances in the background.
At Bluejay we've been thinking about this too. One of our customers came to us with a very specific ask. They needed speakers and commotion in the background to properly stress test their agent because nothing in our existing library felt close enough to their real world conditions. So Ronniel, one of our newest engineers, did what any great engineer would do. He went out with his friends at a restaurant for his going away party, recorded the background noise and conversation for about a minute, looped it, and added it into our simulation library.
That's now a real environment you can test your agent against.
It sounds like a small thing but it says a lot about how you have to operate in this space. Voice AI is moving so fast that the solutions you need don't always exist yet. Sometimes, you have to go out with your friends and make them yourself!
"Latency is still the thing everyone is chasing"
The conversation around latency was the one that got everyone chiming in. Everyone in the room building voice AI knows that even a fraction of a second of delay can break the entire experience. It makes the agent feel robotic, unnatural, and quite frustrating.
What everyone in the room seemed to agree on was that latency is never just one thing. It's a model problem, a carrier problem, and a configuration problem all wrapped into one, and the teams that are winning are the ones who own their infrastructure end to end because that's where you actually get those numbers down.
"Inconsistent quality is the silent killer"
The biggest show of hands of the night came when the topic shifted to inconsistent STT and TTS quality. Now what was interesting is that the conversation quickly moved away from blaming the models themselves.
The real culprit? How you integrate and configure everything together. The models are good. The way they talk to each other, the settings you choose, the way you orchestrate the stack, that's where things break down. And that's exactly the kind of thing you need a proper testing and simulation environment to catch before it reaches a real customer.
What struck me most sitting in that room was how aligned everyone was on one thing. The gap between a voice agent that works in a demo and one that works in the real world is enormous. Closing that gap takes more than good models. It takes rigorous testing, honest evaluation, and the right tools to actually see what's going wrong.
That's the problem Bluejay was built to solve, and nights like this one are a good reminder of why that matters.
As a recap:
- Bluejay is a testing and monitoring platform for Conversational AI agents. Companies ranging from Fortune 10 enterprises to fast-growth startups in the Silicon Valley use Bluejay to make sure their voice and text agents work in production (monitoring) and development (testing) environments.
- Our team, now seven strong, works around the clock to make sure your agent behaves when talking to customers.
- This newsletter is 100% human written. It always has been, and it always will be. Ask yourself about what you are consuming. If the writer hasn't read it, why should you?
The Voice AI community is growing, and we're so happy to facilitate its growth here at Bluejay. After all, it plays directly into our mission:
Announcements
Here's what happened at Bluejay last week:
- The Bluejay team attended the Low Latency Club Meetup at the Telnyx office, where Rohan represented us in the room and shared some great insights on Voice AI!
- Rohan and Azfar visited the 11x headquarters this week to talk about how Bluejay fits into their agent testing workflow!
- Last week, the team pushed 27,635 lines of code to make Conversational AI reliable!
That's all for now. I'll see you next time!
Azfar Khan
Storyteller @ Bluejay
