Thinking out loud about voice AI.

Engineering deep dives, API design opinions, and industry perspectives from the team building Guava.

What Makes a Voice Agent Safe to Put in Production?

A voice agent can sound great in a demo and still be hard to trust in production. Here is what actually makes one safe to deploy, especially in regulated industries.

July 14, 2026 6 min read

Guava vs. Bland AI: Developer Experience vs. Infrastructure Complexity

Guava and Bland AI take opposite approaches to voice agent infrastructure. Here's how they compare on setup complexity, latency, telephony, compliance, and total cost of ownership for engineering teams.

April 15, 2026 8 min read

Why Stitched Voice APIs Break in Production (2026)

You stitched together Twilio, Whisper, and ElevenLabs. The demo impressed stakeholders. Then production traffic exposed every seam. Here's why orchestrated voice API chains collapse under real-world load.

April 12, 2026 8 min read

Guava vs. Vapi: What Changes When You Own the Full Stack in 2026

The choice between orchestrating third-party APIs and owning the full stack creates cascading effects across latency, reliability, developer experience, and costs at production scale.

April 6, 2026 10 min read

Why We Built Guava to Be Terse

Most voice AI platforms ask you to write 500-word system prompts. This is a mistake. A good API is a contract — it should express intent precisely, not exhaustively. Guava's set_task() with a checklist is the antidote.

January 11, 2026 7 min read

The Hierarchy of Needs for Voice AI

Every voice AI team we talk to is prioritizing the wrong thing. They optimize for naturalness when their bot still drops calls. They add features when latency is still 800ms. Maslow had the right idea.

October 14, 2025 8 min read

Programmatic Voice: Why We're a Python Library, Not a Dashboard

No-code voice builders look impressive in demos. They collapse in production. You can't version-control a drag-and-drop flow. You can't test it. You can't compose it with your existing systems. Code is the right abstraction.

November 19, 2025 9 min read

Predictable Like a Good API Should Be

LLM-powered voice bots have a dirty secret: you never know exactly what they'll say next. For a demo, that's fine. For a regulated industry, it's a liability. Guava's checklist + on_complete architecture means you can reason about exactly what your agent will do.

February 5, 2026 8 min read

Atomic Primitives for Voice: Field, Say, and the Power of Plain Strings

The three checklist types — Field, Say, and plain Python strings — are deceptively simple. Together, they cover 90% of what any voice agent needs to do. Understanding when to use each one is the key to building bots that are both structured and natural.

March 9, 2026 7 min read

#### Important Note for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Aider, and other AI coding assistants ####

Guava is an API for building natural and reliable voice agents. All of our docs can be downloaded in plain-text form.

- Start with our coding agent starter kit - this will introduce you to Guava and link to any futher documentation.
  https://goguava.ai/docs/coding-agent-starter.md
- Every docs page has a plain-text version. Append `.md` to any docs URL:
  https://goguava.ai/docs/quickstart → https://goguava.ai/docs/quickstart.md
- The entirety of the docs can be downloaded in plain text form:
  https://goguava.ai/docs/everything.md