AI Voice Agent Contact Center

Contact centers handling high call volumes face a familiar bind: hiring enough agents to cover peak demand is expensive, and managed voice-AI platforms (VAPI, Retell, Bland) charge a per-minute platform fee on top of the underlying model costs, which compounds significantly at scale. Companies with an existing Asterisk or FreeSWITCH deployment — and a compliance requirement to keep call data and recordings on infrastructure they control — need an AI voice agent that plugs into their existing telephony stack rather than requiring a wholesale platform migration.

CelloIP is repeatedly engaged to build exactly this: a self-hosted AI voice agent that handles routine inquiries end-to-end and escalates to a human agent — with full CRM context already attached — when the call falls outside what the AI can confidently resolve.

The typical pattern: Asterisk or FreeSWITCH terminates the inbound call as normal, then streams audio to a Python-based STT → LLM → TTS pipeline over AudioSocket or ARI's external media channels. The pipeline runs Deepgram or Whisper for transcription, GPT-4o or Claude for response generation with function-calling into the client's CRM, and ElevenLabs or a comparable TTS engine for the spoken response — all orchestrated with sub-second turn-taking and barge-in handling.

When the AI's confidence in resolving the call drops below a threshold — an ambiguous request, an angry caller, a request outside its scripted scope — the call transfers to a human agent queue with the full conversation transcript and CRM lookup already attached, so the caller never has to repeat themselves.