Real-time Voice AI Interview Agent
An AI agent that conducts live job interviews over the web and phone, in real time.
The role
Lead Engineer — architecture & implementation
Highlights
- Built a sub-second, barge-in-capable voice pipeline bridging browser and phone callers into one agent.
- Designed a resilient WebSocket transport with client-side recording and Service-Worker upload reliability.
- Replaced a costly managed voice stack with a custom bridge, cutting per-minute cost dramatically.
The problem
An AI interviewer only works if it feels live — it has to listen, think, and respond fast enough that the conversation never feels robotic, on both a laptop mic and a phone line.
What I built
The real-time voice system inside Airbase. Audio streams in over WebSockets (browser) and Twilio Media Streams (phone), runs through a speech-to-text → LLM → text-to-speech pipeline, and streams the reply back — with barge-in so the candidate can interrupt naturally.
Every hop is measured to keep responses under a second; client-side recording plus a Service Worker means no lost audio on flaky networks; and swapping a managed pipeline for a custom bridge cut the per-minute bill by an order of magnitude.
There's a longer write-up in the blog.
Want something like this built?