We ran into something interesting while working on Voice AI systems.
A lot of teams build and test in the US, where calls usually stay in-country, carrier paths are short, and latency is fairly predictable. You can glue together telephony, speech-to-text, a model, and text-to-speech and it behaves well enough.
That same setup often gets reused in EMEA.
On paper, it looks identical. In production, it isn’t.
Calls cross borders much more often, even when callers don’t. Audio traverses more carrier networks. Latency becomes variable rather than just higher. None of this shows up clearly in small pilots, but it starts to matter once you have real traffic.
The AI model usually isn’t the limiting factor. The call path is.
We wrote this up to better understand why Voice AI behaves differently once geography and telecom routing get involved, especially outside the US.
abhi_telnyx•1h ago
A lot of teams build and test in the US, where calls usually stay in-country, carrier paths are short, and latency is fairly predictable. You can glue together telephony, speech-to-text, a model, and text-to-speech and it behaves well enough.
That same setup often gets reused in EMEA.
On paper, it looks identical. In production, it isn’t.
Calls cross borders much more often, even when callers don’t. Audio traverses more carrier networks. Latency becomes variable rather than just higher. None of this shows up clearly in small pilots, but it starts to matter once you have real traffic.
The AI model usually isn’t the limiting factor. The call path is.
We wrote this up to better understand why Voice AI behaves differently once geography and telecom routing get involved, especially outside the US.
Link: https://telnyx.com/resources/why-voice-ai-fails-in-emea-and-...