Building a Real-Time AI Voice Agent for Asterisk

AudioSocket + Deepgram STT + Groq LLM + Cartesia TTS

A production-tested guide to building a voice AI agent that handles live phone calls through Asterisk with sub-250ms response latency.

Table of Contents

Why AI Voice Agents Matter

Architecture Overview

Prerequisites

Component Selection: Why This Stack

Asterisk Configuration

AGI Script: Session Bootstrapping

Python Voice Agent: Core Structure

AudioSocket Protocol Implementation

Deepgram Streaming STT

Groq Streaming LLM with Tool Calling

Cartesia Streaming TTS

The Token-Streaming Pipeline

Barge-In and Interruption Handling

Conversation State Machine

Tool Calling Integration

DID-to-Company Context API

Systemd Service Setup

Latency Optimization Deep Dive

Troubleshooting

Performance Benchmarks

Production Considerations

1. Why AI Voice Agents Matter

Every missed phone call is lost revenue.…