Building voice + AI agents from a backend background and how AI got me there (opens in new tab)

My core is backend engineering Java/Spring, .NET, Python, cloud services. Over the last few months I've been building something well outside that comfort zone: a platform that lets businesses deploy AI-powered voice and WhatsApp assistants, built on LiveKit, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and telephony/SIP integrations. What it does. Businesses can stand up an AI assistant that answers customer calls and WhatsApp messages, pulls accurate answers from their own knowledge base via RAG, a...