Show HN: An open-source telephony stack for AI voice agents (Twilio alternative)
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1 day ago
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We built this stack last summer while working on AI voice agents for healthcare practices.

Twilio worked well functionally, but its HIPAA option started at $2k per month before a single call, and that fixed cost dominated almost immediately, long before usage-based costs like LLM tokens mattered. That imbalance pushed us to build and operate our own telephony layer.

This repo is the result. It's a self-hosted, HIPAA-eligible telephony stack built on Asterisk + AWS Chime that handles phone numbers, SIP/TLS, RTP media, and real-time audio streaming to AI voice agents via a Twilio-like WebSocket interface. A shim server bridges audio to modern WSS-based AI services. You bring the voice AI. This just handles the phone infrastructure. (Example server using OpenAI Realtime API for voice-to-voice included in repo.)

We've since moved on to other projects, but as AI voice agents keep proliferating, we noticed we couldn't find a comprehensive, open-source, self-hostable option in this space. Rather than let it sit unused, we cleaned it up and open-sourced it.

This isn't for everyone. If you don't want to run infrastructure, Twilio is still the easiest option.

Happy to answer questions about architecture, trade-offs, scaling, or design decisions!

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Blog post: https://vectorly.app/blog/open-telephony-stack

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