How to Build a Voice Agent Before You Choose a Stack

​Most voice agents get written against a runtime. You pick LiveKit or Pipecat on day one, and every decision after that is shaped by it. Then a customer asks for data to stay in India, or a better Hindi model ships, or you need to move runtimes, and you end up rebuilding work you already did.

​Unmute flips the order. You describe the agent once, in YAML and Markdown, then compile it to whichever runtime you need and deploy it wherever it has to run.

​Nicola Croon from SLNG, who builds Unmute, is joining us to show how it works in practice, including where the abstraction holds and where it breaks.

​What you'll get

​→ A clear line between what belongs in a portable agent definition and what is genuinely runtime-specific
→ One definition compiled to Pipecat and to LiveKit, side by side, with the output compared live
→ An honest look at where it leaks: turn detection, interruption handling and telephony behave differently per runtime
→ How manifests keep model and region policy separate from the agent, so the person writing it and the person approving it can be different people
→ The same agent deployed self-hosted, on managed cloud, or pinned to an India region for DPDP
→ Swapping Indic models (Hindi, Tamil, Kannada) as a config change instead of a code change
→ What it takes to add your own compile or deploy target, and what a mergeable contribution looks like
→ The open design questions the team has not resolved, where your opinion can actually change the direction

​Who this is for

​Engineers already shipping voice agents in production or close to it. Anyone on LiveKit or Pipecat who has felt locked in. Platform teams supporting several agent builds across a company. You should be comfortable with Python or TypeScript, YAML and a CLI.

​This is not a beginner session. We'll assume you know what STT, turn detection and barge-in are.

​Speaker

​Nicola Croon, Forward Deployed Systems Engineer at SLNG. Builds Unmute.

​Details

​📅 Wednesday, 8 October 2026
🕓 4:00 PM IST
💻 Live on Zoom

​Unmute is MIT licensed and open source. Everything covered is usable without any commercial product. SLNG builds it and runs a commercial platform underneath, but nothing in this session requires it. We're here for contributors, not customers, particularly on new compile targets and Indic language coverage.

​Hosted by Unio, the Voice AI Community.