Why realtime agents fail
Speech is solved. Telephony is solved. The layer that runs the conversation is where projects stall.Prompts lose the plot
Every top model drops ~39% from single-turn to multi-turn - mostly
unreliability, not capability. Take a wrong turn and the conversation
never recovers. Prompt-tuning plateaus around 85%: nothing in a
100-page prompt is addressable, so nothing is testable.
Big models miss the beat
Humans swap turns in ~200ms; past ~700ms a caller hears a machine. The
LLM is ~70% of that budget, and frontier models spend 1.1-1.4s before
their first token - the whole budget, on one hop.
What Unpod runs
Playbooks
Conversations as checkpoints and outcomes, not prose. Every step is
addressable - so it can be simulated, fixed, and regression-tested.
Context layer
Each turn gets only the context it needs - so the agent stays fast on a
third-party model, or faster on a fine-tuned ~1B SLM trained on your
workflows. Swap either way without touching the conversation.
Sessions
Pass a session id and the agent keeps its state - across turns, and
across calls.
Use it like a model
Same trained agent, three ways in. Your orchestration, speech, and transport
stay where they are.
Where Unpod sits
Layer 3
Agent platformsVapi / Retell / Bland
used by
Layer 2
UnpodCommunication infra
builds on
Layer 1
Raw telephonyTwilio / Plivo / Bandwidth
Start building
Getting Started
Your first request, in about 2 minutes.
GitHub
Open source, MIT. Self-host the full stack.