Telephony — answering phone calls

The public phone network delivers audio as G.711 (μ-law or A-law) at 8 kHz; the Live API expects PCM16 at 16 kHz in and produces 24 kHz out. The gemini_adk_fluent_rs::telephony module bridges the two on top of voice::pump — the same device-independent duplex core that drives a local microphone — so a phone call gets the same guarantees as any other voice surface: resampling both directions, and barge-in that drops buffered speech rather than playing over the caller.

caller ──μ-law 8k──▶ Twilio ──WS JSON──▶ TwilioCall ──PCM16──▶ pump ──16k──▶ Live session
caller ◀─μ-law 8k── Twilio ◀──WS JSON── TwilioCall ◀─Playback── pump ◀─24k── model audio
                                        Playback::Flush  ⇒  {"event":"clear"}   (barge-in)

Twilio Media Streams

Media Streams forks a live call over a WebSocket: μ-law 8 kHz frames arrive base64-encoded in JSON text messages; JSON messages you send play back to the caller. TwilioCall adapts that protocol onto a connected session — it owns no socket, so it works with any WebSocket server:

use gemini_adk_fluent_rs::prelude::*;
use gemini_adk_fluent_rs::telephony::TwilioCall;

let session = Live::builder()
    .instruction("You are the front desk. This is a voice call — keep it short.")
    .greeting("Greet the caller and ask how you can help.")
    .connect_from_env()
    .await?;

let mut call = TwilioCall::attach(&session);
loop {
    tokio::select! {
        Some(Ok(msg)) = ws.recv() => {
            if let Message::Text(text) = msg {
                if call.from_twilio.send(text).await.is_err() { break; }
            }
        }
        Some(frame) = call.to_twilio.recv() => ws.send(Message::Text(frame)).await?,
        else => break,
    }
}

Forward Twilio’s text frames into from_twilio; forward everything from to_twilio back over the socket. The bridge handles the rest:

• Inbound audio: media frames are μ-law-decoded to PCM16 @ 8 kHz and pumped into the session (resampled to 16 kHz).

• Outbound audio: session audio comes back at 8 kHz, is μ-law-encoded, and sent as media frames.

• Barge-in: an interruption becomes Twilio’s clear message, which drops every frame Twilio has buffered server-side. Without this, the model keeps “speaking” for seconds after the caller interrupts — the classic broken-telephony-bot failure.

• DTMF: keypad digits land in session state — telephony:dtmf (last digit) and telephony:dtmf_history (all digits, in order) — where flow guards, watchers, and phase transitions read them like any other fact:

  .phase("gather_account")
      .transition("verify", S::eq("telephony:dtmf_history", json!("1234")))

• Call metadata: telephony:call_sid and telephony:stream_sid are set from the start frame; <Parameter> values from your TwiML arrive in [StartMeta::custom_parameters].

The runnable example

examples/telephony is a complete phone agent — an axum server with two routes:

• POST /twiml — the Twilio voice webhook. Returns <Response><Connect><Stream url="wss://<host>/media"/></Connect></Response>, deriving the host from the request so it works behind a tunnel.
• GET /media — the Media Streams WebSocket. One Live session per call.

export GEMINI_API_KEY=...
cargo run -p example-telephony       # listens on 0.0.0.0:8080
ngrok http 8080                      # during development
# Twilio Console → your number → Voice → webhook: https://<ngrok-host>/twiml (POST)

Call the number: the agent greets you, and you can interrupt it mid-sentence.

G.711 codecs

telephony::g711 implements both ITU-T G.711 companding laws as pure functions — encode_ulaw / decode_ulaw (North America, Japan, Twilio) and encode_alaw / decode_alaw (most SIP trunks elsewhere) — tested for monotonicity and bounded quantisation error. Combined with [voice::resample], they are the building blocks for any other telephone transport.

Raw SIP — no carrier in the path (feature sip)

telephony::sip terminates the call in-process: SIP signalling via rsipstack (the stack under the rustpbx PBX), and G.711-over-RTP media built from this crate’s own pure layers (telephony::rtp, telephony::sdp, telephony::g711). Any SIP endpoint — a softphone, an Asterisk/FreeSWITCH extension, a provider’s SIP trunk — dials the agent directly:

use gemini_adk_fluent_rs::telephony::sip::SipAgent;

let mut agent = SipAgent::bind("0.0.0.0:5060".parse()?).await?;
while let Some(incoming) = agent.next_call().await {
    println!("call from {}", incoming.from);       // screen before answering
    let session = Live::builder()
        .instruction("Answer the phone politely.")
        .greeting("Greet the caller.")
        .connect_from_env().await?;
    let call = incoming.answer(&session).await?;   // SDP answer + RTP starts
    tokio::spawn(async move { call.ended().await; });
}

What answer does: picks the offer’s preferred G.711 law (μ-law or A-law), binds an RTP socket, sends the SDP answer in the 200 OK, and runs a paced 20 ms media loop on the same voice::pump. Media is symmetric RTP — it sends toward the offer’s address but re-latches onto the source of the first arriving packet, so NATted softphones work. Barge-in on raw RTP has no carrier buffer to clear: the agent is the buffer, and Playback::Flush drops it. The caller hanging up (BYE) resolves call.ended(); call.hangup() sends BYE the other way.

examples/sip-agent is the runnable end:

export GEMINI_API_KEY=...
cargo run -p example-sip-agent    # 0.0.0.0:5060/udp
# From Linphone/Zoiper on the same network: call sip:gemini@<host>

Deliberately not there yet: SIP registration (the agent is a directly-dialed UAS) and SRTP (the Twilio path additionally has DTMF via its protocol). The signalling layer is covered by an in-repo integration test that drives a hand-written SIP UAC against a bound agent (OPTIONS → 200, INVITE → ringing → surfaced call → reject → final failure).

Bringing your own transport

Twilio and raw SIP are two connectors on one seam. A contact-center platform that exposes a virtual-agent slot — a gRPC bidirectional audio stream (as in Cisco Webex CC’s BYoVA or Genesys AudioHook style integrations), a proprietary media WebSocket, anything that can move 20 ms audio frames both ways — becomes a third connector by composing the same parts:

1. Audio: decode inbound frames to mono PCM16 and feed voice::pump (or pump_processed, for a denoiser chain) at the transport’s native rate; encode Playback::Chunk back out; treat Playback::Flush as the platform’s “stop playback” action — that is barge-in.
2. Semantics: land keypresses and call identity through telephony::bridge (record_dtmf, the shared telephony: state keys), so flows and guards behave identically across transports.
3. Hardening: attach the latency filler and the handoff recorder from the same module — see Hardening a Voice Deployment.

This is not a hypothetical: examples/audiohook is a third connector built exactly this way, speaking the open AudioHook protocol a Genesys-style contact-center platform dials out to — JSON text frames for the session lifecycle, binary μ-law frames for audio, both directions. The wire dialect (envelope sequencing, media negotiation, position tracking, the platform’s connection probe) lives in one pure state machine with its own offline test suite; the glue between it and a governed session is one select! loop. Barge-in becomes an AudioHook barge_in event, DTMF lands in the same telephony:* keys, and the latency filler attaches with one line — no SDK changes anywhere.

TwilioCall::attach (~100 lines) and the AudioHook example’s ServerSession are the references: each owns no socket, speaks its platform’s dialect at the edges, and delegates everything else to the shared components. A new connector should look like them.

Choosing a path

	Twilio Media Streams	Raw SIP (sip feature)	AudioHook (example)
Who terminates PSTN	Twilio (also Vonage/Telnyx equivalents)	your SIP trunk / PBX	the contact-center platform
Transport	WebSocket you host	UDP SIP + RTP in-process	WebSocket you host
Barge-in	clear message to carrier	drop own RTP buffer	barge_in event to platform
DTMF	✓ (telephony:dtmf* state)	✓ (RFC 4733, same state keys)	✓ (dtmf message, same state keys)
Extra dependency	none (any WS server)	rsipstack	none (any WS server)