Phone calls have always been the one channel bacher-ai’s voice agents couldn’t reach — everything ran through the web app or the LiveKit Playground. That’s changed. A new SIP bridge now connects real phone numbers directly into the platform’s LiveKit voice agents, and the first agent built for it is already live: a phone-answering assistant that picks up missed calls, takes a message, and gets it to you automatically.
How the SIP bridge works
Under the hood, an Asterisk + livekit-sip bridge sits between the public phone number and the LiveKit agent runtime. An inbound call is routed through a SIP trunk and dispatch rule straight into a dedicated agent worker — no cloud call-handling service, no third-party telephony platform. It’s the same self-hosted philosophy that runs the rest of bacher-ai, just extended to a channel most people still reach for first: the phone.
Meet the phone-answering agent
The first agent to use this bridge is a dedicated call-answering assistant. When a call comes in, it collects the caller’s name, reason for calling, and a callback number, then sends a structured summary by email — no voicemail to dig through later. It also recognizes typical sales and survey calls and keeps them talking in a harmless, time-wasting loop instead of ever reaching a real message intake. A first production test call confirmed the whole path end-to-end: the agent answered, took the message, and the summary arrived automatically.
Still in beta
This is an early capability, not a finished product. Conversations don’t always flow as naturally as a real phone call yet — there can be a noticeable pause before the agent replies, which breaks the rhythm of back-and-forth conversation. It works reliably for its core job of taking a message, but it’s honest to call it beta rather than polished.
What’s next
The main focus going forward is responsiveness. Newer realtime voice models are built to close exactly this kind of gap, cutting the lag between what’s said and what’s heard back — and that’s the direction this agent is headed next. Beyond that, expect refinement of how it handles edge cases as it fields more real calls over time.
SIP-connected voice agents are available on request — if you’d like a phone number routed into a bacher-ai agent of your own, get in touch.
Key Takeaways
- bacher-ai voice agents can now be reached by real phone calls via a self-hosted SIP bridge.
- The first agent live on this path answers missed calls and emails a structured message summary.
- It also detects and stalls likely spam/sales callers automatically.
- Currently in beta — response timing isn’t fully natural yet.
- Realtime voice models are the next planned improvement for latency.
Image: AI-generated on bacher-ai.com