Voice AI Explained: The Complete Glossary and Beginner's Guide
A beginner's guide to voice AI that follows one phone call from first ring to reply and ends with a 20-term glossary grouped by where each term shows up.
Read the full guide →Deep Dives in This Series
How the Voice AI Pipeline Works: STT to LLM to TTS, Step by Step
Follow one caller's sentence through speech-to-text, the language model and text-to-speech, with where the time goes at each stage and what breaks between them.
What Is an Orchestration Layer in Voice AI? Every Job It Runs
What a voice AI orchestration layer does on a live call, from custom dictionaries and turn detection to transfers, voicemail and speech-to-speech models.
Barge-In, Endpointing, and Turn-Taking: Voice UX Fundamentals
How a voice agent decides the caller is done, when to stop talking, and which sounds to ignore, with the settings that control each decision.
Cascade vs Speech-to-Speech: Tradeoffs Explained
How cascade and speech-to-speech voice agents compare on tool calling, latency, voice and cost in 2026 benchmarks, and how to choose per agent.
AI Voice Agent vs IVR: From Keypad Menus to Open Conversation
How phone calls moved from keypad menus to open conversation: who does the understanding now, where fixed wording lives, when an IVR still wins, and how to switch.