Series · 7 parts Published April 28, 2026

Voice agent

A serverless voice agent on AWS that answers your business phone, replies from your own knowledge in real time, and politely passes the rest to a human. Seven posts on the same system — one diagram at a time — with an engineering reference at the end.

  1. 01

    A voice agent on AWS for the price of a phone plan

    The whole system on one page — a listener, a brain, a speaker, and the under-one-second loop they share.

  2. 02

    How a call connects

    Three ways a call can go: voicemail after hours, AI session in business hours, or direct human transfer for VIP numbers.

  3. 03

    How the listener hears

    Streaming transcription, partial guesses refined live, locked the moment the caller pauses.

  4. 04

    How the brain decides what to say

    Four tools, one pick per turn: answer, book, transfer, end. The AI is allowed to be confident or to defer — never to invent.

  5. 05

    How the speaker stays natural

    The latency budget for a one-second-or-less reply. Where each millisecond goes, and what happens when the budget blows.

  6. 06

    What the voice agent costs

    Phone-bill territory at SMB volume. The phone number is the floor; everything else scales with how often it rings.

  7. 07

    Engineering reference: the voice agent architecture

    Same system, drawn purely for engineers. Service names, resource identifiers, region, Bedrock model IDs.

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