World's Fair 2025
Building voice agents with OpenAI — Dominik Kundel, OpenAI
Overview
This talk introduces OpenAI's Agents SDK for TypeScript, focusing on building voice agents. It defines agents as systems that accomplish tasks independently using a model, instructions, and tools, all managed by a runtime. The SDK offers features like handoffs, guardrails, streaming, tool calling, and native voice support, aiming to make technology more accessible and information exchange richer through voice.
Who should watch
- AI engineers and builders interested in creating voice-enabled applications.
- Product Managers exploring new interaction paradigms for their products.
- Developers looking to leverage OpenAI's latest SDK for agent development.
- Anyone interested in the technical challenges and solutions for building real-time voice agents.
Key takeaways
- The OpenAI Agents SDK for TypeScript is now available, mirroring the Python SDK's capabilities with added human-in-the-loop support and native voice agent features.
- Voice agents offer increased accessibility and can convey information more densely than text through tone and emotion.
- Two primary architectures for voice agents exist: a chained approach (speech-to-text, text-based agent, text-to-speech) and a speech-to-speech approach using models trained directly on audio for lower latency and richer context.
- The SDK facilitates building voice agents with features like interruption handling, tool calling, context management, and built-in tracing for debugging.
- Best practices for voice agents include starting with a clear, small goal, implementing evals and guardrails early, and leveraging generative models for prompting personality and tone.
- The SDK supports delegation to more specialized backend agents for complex tasks, enabling a modular approach to agent design.
- Real-time sessions handle audio input/output, guardrails, and handoffs, with WebRTC and WebSocket support for browser and server communication.
- The SDK allows for defining tools using ZOD schemas for validation and provides a traces UI for debugging agent interactions and tool calls.
Notable quotes
*A system that is going to accomplish tasks independently on behalf of users.*
*It makes technology much more accessible to people.*
*The agents SDK makes this really easy because you can then later on add additional tools to additional agents.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.