ClueCon Weekly with Brian West [Sn 15 Ep. 5]: Guardrails for AI-- How to Keep Voice Agents on Track

ClueCon Weekly with Brian West [Sn 15 Ep. 5]: Guardrails for AI-- How to Keep Voice Agents on Track

This week, host Jon Gray welcomes FreeSWITCH legend and SignalWire’s Director of Support & Developer Experience, Brian West. Brian walks through how SignalWire’s AI Agent stack lets you build voice agents that behave predictably, by putting code and state machines in charge while the LLM handles language and tool calls. He covers the evolution from SWML (SignalWire Markup Language) to the Python-based Agents SDK and a fully open-source Agents UI (Docker-ready), making it possible to start at any skill level: raw JSON/YAML, Python, or no-code UI. The episode features a live “Holy Guacamole” drive-thru demo that shows how to keep agents on the rails: menu matching via vectors, combo/upsell logic in code, quantity limits, and real-time UI updates—all orchestrated by SignalWire’s AI layer and SWAG (SignalWire AI Gateway) for deterministic tool calling (including MCP bridging).
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What you’ll learn
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✔️ How to split responsibilities: LLM for understanding, code for rules
✔️ Designing agent steps that “forget” irrelevant context as they advance
✔️ Emitting user events to drive web UIs directly from the voice agent
✔️ Practical scaffolding to ship an end-to-end agent in a day
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Resources: