I'm a telecom engineer, and have been my entire career. Every job, contract, and company I have built has had something to do with telecom. It is only natural that I would approach the AI boom from a telecom perspective, and even name the resulting company "Voice" as if its our one and only goal and purpose.
That was short sighted.
Our industry came up with a new term recently - the Agent Harness. I realized after reading an article about "six different approaches to the Agent Harness" that this is what we are actually doing.
Agents need a place to run. They are more than the models that supply their reasoning - they are recursive loops and algorithms, state machines, and cleverly bundled tools and API calls to extend their reach. You can run agents "locally", say on your desktop or even your phone, but can you guarantee those devices are always on, and always connected? Cloud hosted really does make the most sense.
The article went on to describe "harnesses" that ranged from SDKs (like Nvidia's stack) that require quite a bit of engineering to pull together, to "do-everything-for-you" platforms that make it easy to assemble agents and launch them quickly, perhaps with a bit less overall control.
VoxLayer definitely falls into that later category - we aim to make it super simple for our direct customers and resellers to launch agents and connect them in any number of ways to their audience. Our offerings are intended to be canned - our receptionist trained on thousands of calls to make it REALLY good at routing calls and taking messages - is ready for production use. Competitors that are taking a more SDK approach just make it more difficult for clients and resellers to create and deploy production quality products.
As a harness and a cozy place for agents to live and operate VoxLayer has impressive potential. We may have started with a telecom focus, but our agents will soon embrace automation and tools such that our added value will be far more than the number of ways you can interact with them. It will be what they can do for you and your company.