Voice AI glossary,
in plain English

A voice AI agent is an AI system that holds real-time spoken conversations via phone, web or SIP — combining speech recognition, an LLM and speech synthesis.

Voice AI is the umbrella term for AI that understands and generates human speech in real time — powering voice assistants, phone agents and translation.

Conversational AI is the category of AI that interacts with humans in natural language across chat, voice, email and messaging — using NLU, LLMs and tools.

IVR is a rigid scripted tree (press 1 for sales). Voice AI is a natural-language agent that understands free-form speech, reasons and calls tools.

BYOK lets you bring your own LLM, STT and TTS API keys — the voice AI platform routes usage through your accounts instead of bundling provider costs.

BYON lets you bring your own phone number — via Twilio, Vobiz or Exotel — and connect it to the voice AI platform via SIP instead of renting one.

SIP trunking lets a voice AI platform send and receive phone calls over the internet, connecting to the PSTN via a carrier like Twilio or Vobiz.

The voice AI stack is a 4-part pipeline: ASR/STT (speech to text), NLU/LLM (understanding), TTS (text to speech), and the orchestration layer.

Voice AI latency is the time between the user finishing a sentence and hearing the agent respond — the most important quality metric for voice AI.

PII is any data that can identify a specific person, either on its own or combined with other information.

PII redaction automatically detects and masks sensitive personal data in voice AI transcripts and logs before it gets stored.

Turn detection is how a voice AI agent decides when the caller has finished speaking so it can respond at the right moment.

A no-code voice AI builder is a visual flow editor that lets non-engineers design and deploy voice agents — drag-and-drop blocks for steps, tools and branching.