Building Production Voice AI That Actually Works: Lessons from Daily & Pipecat Co-Founder, Kwindla Hultman-Kramer

On this episode of Deployed we talk with Kwindla Hultman-Kramer, co-founder of Daily (daily.co) and creator of Pipecat (pipecat.ai), the most widely used open source framework for voice agent orchestration.

Kwin shares insights from building voice AI infrastructure since before it was cool, including why he thinks we've hit an inflection point now where voice agents are quickly moving from demos to real production deployments with real ROI. 

He breaks down the technical stack that actually works in production in July 2025, explains why most audio-specific evals are still "vibes" (and why that's okay if you get your text evals right!), and shares tactical advice that could save months of trial and error — like why you should use WebRTC instead of WebSockets, and why speech-to-speech models aren't quite ready for production yet.

Whether you're curious about voice AI or already building voice agents, this conversation offers practical guidance from someone who's seen hundreds of teams navigate the journey from prototype to production scale.

If you want to go deeper on this content, check out Kwin's Voice AI & Voice Agents book (https://voiceaiandvoiceagents.com/) and his popular Maven course (https://maven.com/pipecat/voice-ai-and-voice-agents-a-technical-deep-dive).