Conversational AI that speaks

What is conversational AI?

Conversational AI is software that takes natural-language input, works out what the person wants, and responds across multiple turns. Chat assistants are the version most people know. Applied to speech, it's a voice agent: it listens while you talk, decides when you've finished, answers out loud, and handles interruptions without losing the thread.

Speaking adds constraints that chat doesn't have. A chatbot can take three seconds to start a sentence; a caller will hang up. People trail off mid-thought, talk over the agent, and expect it to pick up the thread anyway. So the pieces around the language model matter as much as the model: transcription that runs while the caller is still talking, turn detection that knows when a pause means "your turn", and speech that starts streaming back in under a second.

Or let Managed Agents run the loop

Managed Agents wires the loop for you: pick your LLM, connect tools and transfers, add a knowledge base, and get a phone number. You configure the agent; Cartesia runs the streaming stack underneath.