What it really takes to build great AI voice agents

Think you’ve nailed your voice-AI demo? Wait until the first 500 callers hit “0” in frustration.

Every second matters in voice interactions. Even a one-second delay can increase abandonment rates by up to 23% and cause a steep drop in user satisfaction. What looks polished in a test call can fall apart in production if the foundation isn’t built for real-time performance.

Building AI voice agents that are natural, respond instantly, and work seamlessly across devices and regions is no small feat. Expectations for voice AI have never been higher, and with AI projected to autonomously resolve 80% of routine customer service requests by 2029 and drive 30% reductions in operational costs, businesses are under pressure to deliver real, scalable results.

Yet the path to production is full of pitfalls. Over 85% of AI projects still fail to meet their objectives, often due to poor integration, limited scalability, or a lack of infrastructure readiness. Latency alone is a deal-breaker. Delays above 300ms can disrupt the natural flow of a conversation, leading to dropped interactions and frustrated users.

Many teams underestimate what’s required to make AI voice agents truly work. Some start with a couple of cloud APIs and a clever prompt while others get a demo running in a week. But building something that delivers consistently high-quality, low-latency voice interactions at scale takes much more time and engineering resources to get right. You need dedicated infrastructure, enterprise-grade telephony, and a flexible AI stack all working in harmony.

That’s where Telnyx comes in. By unifying these layers into a single platform, we make it dramatically easier to go from prototype to production without compromise.

Let’s break down what it actually takes and how Telnyx helps you get there faster.

The three pillars of great AI voice agents

Delivering a truly exceptional AI voice agent experience requires more than just smart prompts or a reliable LLM. Behind every natural conversation is a foundation of technology working together to ensure speed, clarity, and reliability and at the core are three essential, interconnected components: infrastructure, telephony, and a purpose-built AI stack.

If even one layer falls short, the entire experience suffers. A strong foundation enables AI voice agents to perform at scale and deliver the speed, quality, dependability, and consistency users expect.

The three pillars checklist

Not sure where your stack stands? Use this quick self-check to spot common red flags around the three core pillars. If you hit a red flag, keep reading. We’ll show you how to fix it.

Have you hit a red flag? Keep reading.

Core infrastructure needed for AI voice agents

Every voice interaction relies on a sophisticated layer of real-time communication infrastructure. Fast servers alone are not enough. You need high-performance networks with global reach, intelligent media routing, and latency that outpaces the competition. These systems must also support high availability, ensure data privacy, and comply with regional regulations. Without this level of infrastructure, even the most advanced AI voice agents risk delays, dropped calls, or failed interactions that frustrate users.

Telephony integrations are key for global AI voice agents

AI voice agents must be accessible across the channels your customers already use, including phone calls, messaging, and chatbots. This requires voice quality that rivals traditional phone calls, seamless integration with the global PSTN, and adaptation to local telephony standards in every region where you operate. Real-time controls like holds, transfers, and recordings must work flawlessly, and number provisioning should be fast and reliable. Without this foundation, your agents will struggle to meet even the most basic expectations users have for a phone call.

What powers high-performing AI voice agents? The right stack

This is the intelligence layer of the agent, where spoken language is understood, processed, and turned into fluid, human-like responses. Building high-quality agents requires more than plugging into a single LLM. You need best-in-class speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems, along with an orchestration layer that manages memory, context, and logic across conversations. Agents must support multi-turn conversations, respond to interruptions naturally, and transition seamlessly between AI and human support. As use cases grow more complex, modern agents increasingly rely on multiple AI models working in tandem with backend systems, making orchestration, flexibility, and safe iteration essential for success.

Where most AI voice agents fall short

Many teams approach AI voice agents by assembling parts from different vendors. It often starts with a promising prototype: a speech-to-text API from one provider, a telephony integration from another, a cloud-based LLM, and perhaps a CPaaS for call control. On the surface, this modular approach offers flexibility and access to best-in-class tools, but in practice, it creates a fragile system with multiple points of failure and little control.

As these agents move from demo to production, complexity multiplies. Latency creeps in, voice quality becomes inconsistent, and support tickets start piling up. Debugging turns into vendor roulette, and scaling means rework instead of momentum. The most common pain points include:

• Latency creep: Every additional API hop adds about 60ms to the call, breaking down the experience even further. Because Telnyx owns the entire Voice AI stack, we reduce the number of hops required and are able to keep latency as low as possible.
• No single source of truth: When issues arise, monitoring is fragmented and support turns into a finger-pointing loop between vendors. Your team is left guessing where the problem lives. Telnyx, on the other hand, provides complete observability in one dashboard.
• 2:00 AM outages: An expired certificate from a sub-vendor brings everything down, and no one flagged it. Telnyx offers a single SLA and proactive monitoring.
• Scaling friction: Every new market, use case, or volume spike demands code rewrites or vendor re-evaluations. Telnyx is designed for global communications and makes scaling easier than ever.

What starts as a shortcut quickly becomes a long-term liability that slows down innovation, increases costs, and keeps teams stuck in maintenance mode instead of accelerating innovation.

Why Telnyx is different: Our unified approach to AI voice agents

Telnyx is purpose-built for ultra-low-latency AI voice agents. While most providers rely on third-party APIs and infrastructure, Telnyx owns and operates the full stack, from the global voice network and numbering resources to dedicated AI infrastructure and orchestration tooling.

Telnyx is a licensed carrier with PSTN replacement in over 60 countries, and operates a private MPLS backbone that routes traffic efficiently and securely across continents. This means lower latency, higher call quality, and visibility into every interaction. Telnyx-owned GPU clusters power in-house TTS models, low-latency STT, and open-source LLM orchestration, eliminating the need to rely on external compute or wait on vendor roadmaps.

More importantly, every component of our platform is engineered to work together seamlessly, which means fewer integration points and full observability across the entire system. Our private backbone and co-located AI infrastructure help keep round-trip time consistently low, enabling smoother and more natural conversations. Telnyx customers see an average time-to-production of under two weeks for new deployments.

With Telnyx, there’s no vendor sprawl or uncertainty. We control the foundation so you can focus entirely on building better AI voice agent experiences.

How this makes building intelligent AI voice agents easier with better outcomes

With Telnyx, teams move from prototype to production in days rather than months. Our platform brings infrastructure, telephony, and AI orchestration together in one place. This allows builders to focus on delivering great experiences rather than wiring up telephony infrastructure, managing carriers across regions, or searching for affordable AI compute.

Global launches no longer require region-by-region setup or complex compliance workarounds. AI voice agents sound more humanlike with NaturalHD voices. They respond faster thanks to ultra-low latency from our private telephony network and co-located GPUs. Built-in testing makes iteration safe and measurable. Features like Memory, multi-agent orchestration, and cross-channel handoffs are available out of the box and easy to extend.

☑️ Faster launch

☑️ More engaging agents

☑️ Easily test and iterate

☑️ Scale with ease

Whether you’re testing a single AI voice agent or scaling to millions of interactions, Telnyx provides the tools, infrastructure, and reliability to launch faster, scale effortlessly, and deliver exceptional user experiences.

The difference is in the foundation

So it’s clear there’s more to a great AI voice agent than clever prompts and the latest LLM. It takes a deeply complex and reliable foundation where infrastructure, telephony, and AI orchestration work together as a single system.

By controlling every layer of the stack, the network, carrier infrastructure, dedicated GPUs, and orchestration tooling, Telnyx removes the friction that is slowing builders down. Integration becomes seamless, latency is consistently low, and visibility extends from the initial call to the final response. There are no handoffs between vendors, gaps in accountability, or reliance on someone else’s roadmap.

The result? Faster deployment, greater reliability, and a platform that grows with your needs. If you are ready to build engaging AI voice agents that perform in real-world environments and scale with confidence, Telnyx gives you the foundation to do it right.