2026-05-22 · 9 min read
Inbound Telegram voice call hits the user's account. The voice-agent service answers with a Pipecat pipeline configured by the linked persona. The caller hears the same identity that handles their text messages.
cascade: Deepgram streaming STT + OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini LLM + Cartesia streaming TTS. Median first-word latency 600–900 ms. About $0.06 / minute.
realtime: OpenAI Realtime over a single WebSocket. 300–500 ms latency, higher per-minute cost. Best for premium tiers.
realtime_gemini: Google Gemini Live, multimodal, single WebSocket. cascade_local: self-hosted Whisper + MMS-TTS-RUS or Coqui XTTS. Zero per-minute provider cost; pay only for the GPU.
Per-user BYOK applied to voice: the agent resolves the persona owner and uses that user's API keys for every external call. Per-tier cost guards and a hard per-session timeout protect against runaway sessions.
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