Engineering
5 Lessons from Building a Voice AI Prescription Agent
What we learned building a prescription-intake voice agent with Stream's Vision Agents SDK and AssemblyAI: five lessons for safety-critical AI agents.
Real-Time Voice AI For Phone Support In 2026
A phone support voice AI needs to react in real time - start replying within 300ms, stop the moment a caller interrupts, and handle the telephony edge before the model sees the audio. This guide covers the full pipeline - streaming STT, TTS, turn detection, barge-in, and the latency budget that keeps calls feeling natural.
Warm Transfer vs Cold Transfer: Designing AI-to-Human Escalation in Real-Time Voice Systems
Warm transfer carries the conversation's context to the human agent - the summary, the intent, the caller's mood - so the human can pick up mid-story. Cold transfer carries only the audio, and the caller starts over. Building warm transfer in a real-time voice system means solving three problems when to escalate, how to generate structured context in parallel with the live call, and how to hand off the audio session without breaking it.
The End of the Orb: Building AI Agents That Feel Present
TLDR: Agents these days are blind and not very engaging, so we decided to team up with Anam and Inworld to build an agent using Vision Agents that feels personal and aware of the world around you. Give it a try here. Most voice agents today are blind. They hear words, convert them to text,
Scaling Event-Driven Systems Without Compromising Mobile App Stability
Event-driven architecture is nothing new. IBM MQ shipped in 1993. JMS has been around since 1998. Kafka launched in 2011. But for most of that history, event-driven patterns were for specialized domains. Most developers never touched them. That's changed. Real-time mobile features, such as chat, activity feeds, live collaboration, or presence indicators, have pushed event-driven
Vision Agents v0.5.0 Release: Local Hardware I/O, Anam Avatars, and Faster Deepgram TTS
It's been a busy period since our last release, and now it's time to share Vision Agents v0.5.0: a step toward making production-grade multimodal AI agents easy to build and deploy. While previous versions laid the groundwork for real-time voice, video, and Vision Agents, v0.5.0 focuses on stability at scale and even more expressive
The Architecture and Best Practices for Mobile App Stability
A frozen message composer. A feed that won't load. A draft that vanishes. None of these register as crashes, but all of them lose users. Add real-time features, like chat, activity feeds, or live streaming, and your crash rate can look pristine in Crashlytics while your app silently drops messages and bleeds memory. This guide
How to Build a Social Media App: A Technical Guide
Building a social media app means a single user action must propagate to potentially millions of other users in real time, while staying fast, safe, and cheap. Every feature touches every other feature. And the hard problems shift as you scale. At 100K users, it's the database. At 1M users, it's the fan-out strategies. At
