SF Tech Week 2026 kept us busy. The same week as our dinner with Twilio, we also joined From Prototype to Production: Scaling Voice AI, an evening hosted by Agora and RiseLink in San Francisco’s Financial District as part of Agora’s Convo AI World series.
The invite promised tech talks, live demos, a panel, and networking, and over 200 builders, founders, and engineers came through for it. The room was full of people working on voice agents, AI avatars, real-time translation, and multimodal products, which made for very good hallway conversation.
A live Bluejay demo
Our founding engineer Abhived Pulapaka demoed Bluejay live on stage, alongside Hermes Frangoudis showing Agora’s ConvoAI Engine and Tess Kassier showing RiseLink. Demoing voice AI to a room full of people who build voice AI for a living is a proper stress test, and honestly a fun one.
The panel: getting voice AI into production
After the demos, Abhived joined the panel with Erika Kettleson, Applied AI Engineer at OpenAI, Anurag Patnaik, Head of AI Engineering at Autodesk, and Raoul Ritter, with Andrew Thompson moderating. They got into build versus buy, multi-model architectures, and the tradeoffs between quality, cost, and speed when voice AI meets production traffic. The questions from the room afterwards were just as good as the ones on stage.
What we took away
A few things we were still chewing on after the event:
- Latency is contextual. How fast a conversation feels comes from the whole system architecture, not any single component.
- Open source models are closing the gap, which makes control and customization matter more than ever.
- Frontier real-time models simplify the pipeline, but they raise new questions about steerability, observability, and cost.
- Voice evals have to assess the complete interaction, not just isolated components.
Abhived wrote up his own notes from the night in a recap on LinkedIn, and Agora shared one from the organizer side.
See you at the next one
Events like this are where we learn the most about what everyone else is running into, so we will keep showing up. If you want to catch Bluejay at a future event, say hi in our Slack community. And if you would rather build this with us, we are hiring in San Francisco across engineering, go to market, and operations.
