Customer experience automation is heating up—fast. The next wave isn’t chatbots, digital avatars, or scripted IVR trees. It’s real-time AI voice agents that sound natural, react instantly, and can juggle millions of calls across unpredictable networks.
That’s the arena Agora—known for its ultra-low-latency real-time engagement platform—is targeting. And to get there at scale, the company is leaning on Exotel, one of the most pervasive voice and customer engagement platforms powering billions of conversations across India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
The companies today announced a deeper collaboration: Agora will run its Conversational AI Engine on top of Exotel’s programmable voice streaming platform, AgentStream. The goal? Deliver AI-led voice experiences that act less like robotic IVR clones and more like knowledgeable, responsive agents who never lose context—and never put a customer on hold.
And if the companies’ early numbers hold up, the partnership could reshape how enterprises in high-volume markets handle calls, automate workflows, and scale support.
Why This Partnership Matters Now
The CX landscape is undergoing a structural shift. After years of chatbots and rule-based voice systems, enterprises are moving toward LLM-powered, real-time voice bots that feel conversational—not mechanical.
But building those systems reliably at scale is brutally difficult. Enterprises don’t want to manage:
- Telephony integrations
- PSTN routing
- Channel fragmentation
- Network variability
- Carrier compliance
- Latency and packet-loss issues
- Speech-to-text tuning across languages
Agora solves part of the problem with its AI voice engine. Exotel solves the rest with its streaming, telephony, and connectivity backbone.
Together, they’re offering something rare in the enterprise AI market:
A full-stack voice AI deployment without the painful infrastructure baggage.
How the Combined Platform Works
At the center of this collaboration is Exotel AgentStream, a real-time voice streaming layer that acts as connective tissue between AI agents and customers—regardless of channel.
AgentStream routes voice streams across:
- PSTN phone calls
- WhatsApp (voice messages and calls)
- In-app voice
- WebRTC
On top of this, Agora’s Conversational AI Engine handles the intelligence layer:
- Real-time speech-to-text and text-to-speech
- LLM-driven reasoning
- Memory and context retention
- Ultra-low-latency responses
- Intelligent interruption handling
- Noise resilience
- Dynamic conversation flow
Put simply:
Exotel moves the voice. Agora creates the conversation.
This division of labor is exactly why this partnership is notable. Most conversational AI providers struggle to build reliable voice infrastructure across markets like India, where network conditions, carrier behaviors, and latency issues vary wildly. Agora offloads all of that to Exotel.
And Exotel gets access to a global AI partner capable of delivering the kind of real-time, fluid interactions enterprises increasingly expect.
The Market Impact: Cost Savings, Automation, and Scale
The companies have aggressive targets:
50–100 million AI-driven voice interactions annually across India and the Middle East.
That might sound ambitious—until you consider the demand.
Exotel already handles 25 billion customer interactions per year for more than 7,000 enterprises, spanning banking, logistics, healthcare, consumer brands, and more. Many of these industries face:
- skyrocketing inbound traffic
- shrinking margins
- agent shortages
- rising expectations for instant, 24/7 support
AI voice automation is a natural solution. Early pilot customers using the combined stack have reportedly seen:
- 30–40% of routine voice queries automated
- Up to 30% reduction in operational costs
- Lower average handling times
- Higher customer satisfaction and CSAT stability
For industries like BFSI, logistics, and ecommerce—where call volumes often spike unpredictably—this kind of scale and predictability is game-changing.
It also lines up with regional market dynamics. The conversational AI market in India and the GCC region is projected to grow at double-digit CAGR rates through 2030, driven by enterprise digital transformation and consumer demand for faster, more personalized interactions.
Voice is becoming the new interface—and India, with its linguistic diversity and mobile-first population, is the ultimate testing ground.
What Executives Are Saying
Tony Zhao, CEO and Co-founder of Agora, framed the partnership around enterprise demand:
“Enterprises are seeking scalable, intelligent AI solutions that deliver human-like experiences in real time. This partnership merges our Conversational AI Engine with Exotel’s voice infrastructure, making it simpler to deploy AI agents that boost engagement and efficiency.”
Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder and COO of Exotel, emphasized the foundational role of connectivity:
“We power the infrastructure so companies like Agora can focus on intelligence and experience. This integration shows how global AI providers can build on AgentStream to deliver reliable, high-quality voice interactions.”
The subtext:
Voice AI fails without rock-solid infrastructure—and most AI companies don’t have that.
Exotel does. Agora brings the intelligence.
The pairing feels logical, even overdue.
A Shift Toward Real-Time, Lifelike AI Conversations
Agora has spent years fine-tuning real-time audio SDKs used in gaming, telemedicine, education, and live broadcasting. That experience translates directly into conversational AI:
- Sub-200ms latency
- Natural back-and-forth dialog
- Smooth interruption (no awkward “please wait while I finish” moments)
- Resilience in low-bandwidth or noisy environments
- Multi-LLM compatibility
These edges matter. Most AI voice bots still sound like they’re buffering—or worse, guessing. Agora’s RTE (Real-Time Engagement) infrastructure was built to minimize those pain points.
The result: AI that behaves more like a human than a text generator reading a script.
Combine that with Exotel’s reach across India’s telecom fabric, and you get a platform engineered to handle millions of conversations without melting down during peak hours.
Why This Collaboration Stands Out in the AI Landscape
Plenty of companies promise real-time voice AI. Few deliver it consistently, across channels, at telecom scale, in regions with network unpredictability.
This joint solution counters three major challenges that have held back voice AI adoption:
1. Infrastructure Complexity
Most voice AI providers don’t want to manage telecom regulations, routing, carrier behaviors, or cross-channel protocols.
Exotel abstracts all of that away.
2. Latency and Voice Quality
LLMs aren’t designed to operate in real-time voice conditions.
Agora’s RTE backbone bridges that gap, keeping interactions fluid.
3. Deployability at Scale
If a system can’t handle millions of calls, enterprises won’t touch it.
This partnership bets on high-volume, high-availability deployments.
The result is a rare full-stack voice AI solution—global AI smarts with regional telecom muscle.
What This Means for Enterprises
For large enterprises, the immediate advantages are clear:
- Lower support and operations costs
- Faster response times
- Multi-lingual support at scale
- Better personalization via LLM reasoning
- Improved routing and triage
- Enhanced consistency and compliance
- 24/7 availability without staffing constraints
Over time, voice AI deployments tend to evolve from basic automation to:
- complex journey orchestration
- personalized recommendations
- contextual upselling
- intelligent field service automation
- proactive customer engagement
This partnership lays the groundwork for those expansions.
The Bottom Line
Enterprise voice is evolving beyond IVR menus, chatbot transfers, and high-latency call centers.
Customers want to talk—and they want the experience to be fast, natural, and helpful.
Agora and Exotel are betting that the future of customer engagement will be powered by real-time, AI-driven voice agents operating at telecom scale.
With Exotel’s deep regional infrastructure and Agora’s AI-driven intelligence stack, the duo is positioned to deliver one of the most complete voice AI platforms available across India and the Middle East.
If successful, this collaboration could accelerate enterprise adoption of voice AI—and raise expectations for what customer conversations should feel like in the age of generative intelligence.
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