> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.unpod.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Why Unpod
> The agents your team already built - chatbots, LangChain pipelines - map straight to voice. Speech is the missing discipline, and Unpod owns it.
## The problem
Your team has already built the hard part. The chatbot works. The LangChain
agent answers questions in production. The brain exists - prompted, tested,
shipped.
Voice is where it stalls. **Speech is a different engineering discipline, not
more AI work.** Telephony, SIP, carrier accounts, STT/TTS providers, voice
activity detection, barge-in, endpointing, audio transport, scaling under
load - none of it exists in a software team's stack, and none of it makes
your agent any smarter.
Teams routinely spend three or four months wiring this up before their agent
takes a single real call. That time buys no product differentiation. Every
voice startup rebuilds the same plumbing.
Unpod closes the gap: the agent you already have maps straight to voice. Text
in, text out, a phone number on the front. You keep building the brain; Unpod
does the speaking.
## What Unpod handles vs what you write
The line is sharp: the wire between Unpod and your code carries **text, not audio**. Your code never sees a packet, a codec, or a SIP message. It receives transcribed text and returns text. Audio never leaves Unpod's infrastructure.
| Unpod handles | You write |
| ------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------- |
| Telephony, SIP, carriers | The agent's brain - one entrypoint |
| Phone numbers (provision or bring your own) | LLM choice and prompts |
| STT, TTS, and provider failover | Conversation flows and logic |
| VAD, barge-in, endpointing | Tools and business logic |
| Audio transport (phone, WebSocket, WebRTC) | Per-call memory and state |
| Scaling, dispatch, and orchestration | |
| Recordings and transcripts | |
In practice your entire integration is a function that receives a call and runs a dialog:
```python theme={null}
from superdialog import DialogMachine, Flow
from unpod import AgentRunner, CallContext
flow = Flow.load("support.json")
async def handle_call(ctx: CallContext) -> None:
ctx.session.dialog_machine = DialogMachine(flow=flow, llm="anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5")
await ctx.session.run()
AgentRunner(entrypoint=handle_call, agent_id="agt_...").start()
```
(Illustrative - the [Quickstart](/get-started/quickstart) walks through the
runnable version, no flow file needed.)
No pipeline configuration. No WebRTC. No SIP. No carrier account. No audio handling. If you already have an HTTP endpoint or a LangChain agent, you can point Unpod at it with no SDK code at all.
For where this sits in the larger architecture, see [Core Concepts](/get-started/core-concepts).
## Vs the alternatives
The honest comparison is about what you own and how long it takes to get to a real call.
**Rolling your own** (or using a pipeline framework like Pipecat or an audio platform like LiveKit): you assemble and run every component - STT provider, TTS provider, VAD, transport, endpointing, scaling. Maximum control, maximum setup. Phone numbers mean a SIP trunk and a carrier account. Expect months before the first production call, and ongoing operational ownership of the speech layer forever.
**Unpod:** you bring the agent; the speech layer is managed. Numbers provision directly, voice profiles configure STT/TTS with automatic failover, and dispatch and scaling are handled for you. Expect hours to your first call.
Choose to roll your own when you need fine-grained control over the audio pipeline or already run that infrastructure. Choose Unpod when your value is the agent logic and you do not want to become a telephony team.
For the full feature-by-feature comparison, see
[Unpod vs Pipecat vs LiveKit](/get-started/vs-competition).
Unpod's core components are open source - you can self-host the full stack or use the managed cloud. See [Self-Hosting](/platform/self-hosting/quickstart).
## Start building
Talk to your own voice agent in the browser in about five minutes. No phone number needed.
The dialog framework. Turn a prompt or flow graph into an executable conversation - pure text in, pure text out.
Build, configure, and run agents from the hosted UI. No SDK required.