·
8/12/2026

Brian West: Shut Up and Ship: What Carrier-Grade Voice AI Actually Looks Like

8/12/2026
9:30 am
–
10:00 am
InterContinental Chicago
About the session

The AI voice agent space is drowning in noise. 10,000+ LinkedIn posts a month, almost none showing architecture. This talk draws a hard line between demo-grade and carrier-grade.I'll walk through SignalWire's three-layer AI Agent control plane: typed functions, state machines, and prompts, and why collapsing them into a single system prompt is the root cause of every production failure nobody posts about. I'll introduce System Directed AI, the architectural principle that separates code-driven business decisions from AI-driven conversational decisions, and show a concrete System Directed AI technique: zero-argument tool calls that read from validated stored state instead of letting the LLM re-supply data on every call. Fewer arguments, fewer failures, guaranteed consistency.Everything shown is open source at https://github.com/signalwire-demos. No demos, no happy-path videos. Just architecture, code, and the failure modes the industry skips.

Date
8/12/2026
Time
9:30 am
–
10:00 am
Format
Speakers
Same day

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Coder Games
August 12, 2026
·
1:00 pm

Lunch and Lunch-n-Learn: The new SignalWire SDK changes how you build real-time apps

Grab some lunch and join the SignalWire Lunch-n-Learn: Session abstract: The new SignalWire SDK changes how you build real-time apps — less wiring up event handlers, more describing what you want and reacting to state as it changes. This session is a working tour of it, from first import to a call with multiple participants and a working device picker. We'll start with the shape of the SDK and the mental model behind it, then move through the pieces you'll touch in every project: authenticating properly, addressing the thing you want to reach, managing a call and the people in it, and dealing with the messy reality of microphones and cameras. Bring a laptop if you want to follow along.Agenda: SDK Overview — what's in the package, what changed, and the mental model to hold onto while you use it. Observable State — the SDK surfaces state as observable streams instead of scattered callbacks. Why that's a better fit for real-time, and how to consume it without fighting the grain. Authentication — how tokens work, what your backend is responsible for, and the mistakes that bite people in production. Using Addresses — addresses as the unit of "the thing I want to reach." Looking them up, listing them, and dialing them. Calls and Participants — starting a call and handling the participant lifecycle: joins, leaves, mutes, and everything that happens out of order. Device Management — enumerating mics, cameras, and speakers, switching mid-call, and surviving permissions and hot-plugging.

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