Skip the wasted weekend. Building production voice AI with LiveKit.
Voice Agents Handbook, 1st edition. By Mahimai Raja J.
Skip the wasted weekend. Building production voice AI with LiveKit.
Voice Agents Handbook, 1st edition. By Mahimai Raja J.
Nine chapters. Three surfaces: phone, browser, mobile. The patterns from voice agents shipped for plumbers, lawyers, and immigration consultants. The shortest path from “add voice to our product” on a Monday to a working agent answering calls by the weekend.
$9.99 USD on Kindle. Paperback available.
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Mahimai Raja J
Author, Mahimai AI
Mahimai builds and ships production voice agents on LiveKit. He has shipped voice agents for plumbers, lawyers, and immigration consultants, and learned every failure mode in this book the hard way. The handbook is the field guide he wishes existed when he started.
In the community
About the book. Three weekends, collapsed into one read.
The brief “add voice to our product” lands on a backend developer’s desk every week now. What follows is usually three weekends of trial and error: which STT, which LLM, which TTS, how to put it on a phone line, why the agent confirms data the caller never confirmed, why the call drops after thirty seconds, why the build cost six times what the demo predicted. The handbook collapses those weekends into one read.
You start at the LiveKit quickstart and end with a voice agent answering calls for your business: a phone number, a web button, a mobile feature, and the deployment shape that does not crash under load. Nine chapters. Three surfaces.
Every code block runs. Every claim has a number behind it.
Who this is for
You’re a backend developer. Someone on your team (maybe you) decided the product needs voice. You’re comfortable with async Python. You’ve shipped LLM-based features before. You’re trying to figure out what voice actually means in code, infrastructure, and provider choices.
If that’s you, this book skips your first three weekends.
If you’ve never opened a terminal, this isn’t the book for you, and I’ll tell you that up front.
What this book isn’t
This isn’t a guide to training your own STT or TTS models. It isn’t a deep dive on WebRTC internals. It isn’t about chat-style LLM products with optional voice. It isn’t a comparison of every framework: it picks LiveKit and goes deep.
If you want any of those, you want a different book.
What you’ll know how to do. By the last chapter.
- Wire up STT, LLM, and TTS into a working voice agent in about forty lines
- Stay under 800 ms end-to-end, the latency budget voice agents live or die on
- Handle interruptions, silences, and the user on a Bluetooth headset in a Costco parking lot
- Ship the same agent to a phone number, a web button, and a mobile app
- Write prompts for the ear, not the screen, so your agent stops sounding like it’s reading a spreadsheet
- Test with synthetic callers before the first real one hits production
- Deploy without the call dropping at thirty seconds
What is inside. Nine chapters, two appendices.
IntroductionFree sampleConclusion
Part I
Foundations
- 01The Voice Agent Stack on LiveKitFree sample
- 02Your First Agent
Part II
Building Real Agents
- 03Prompts for Voice
- 04Function Tools, State, and Handoffs
- 05Latency, Interruptions, and Turn-Taking
- 06Common Patterns
- 07Surfaces
Part III
Production
- 08Testing with Synthetic Callers
- 09Deployment and Observability
The 800 ms budget. Every stage of a turn has a number.
“Each term is a real, measurable budget. A 600 ms end-to-end feels instant; 1500 ms feels broken. Every 100 ms you shave from the LLM line is directly audible.”
A sample of the writing. Straight from the pages.
“The agent that mishears "drain cleaning" as "drainage exorcism" is funny. The agent that won't stop talking when a frustrated caller is trying to be heard is the one that costs you the customer.”
“Markdown formatting that helps in chat becomes literal "asterisk asterisk" noise in voice.”
“Opus is the reviewer; Haiku is the receptionist.”
Get the book. $9.99 on Kindle.
Out now. Pick your local Amazon store.
Prefer print?Buy the paperback on Amazon USA
Questions
Will the book be updated as the field changes?
Why LiveKit specifically, not Pipecat or building from scratch?
Do I need a LiveKit Cloud account to follow along?
Is there a paperback?
Will there be a video course?
What if it doesn't help me?
Read the sample today. Free PDF in your inbox.
The Introduction plus Chapter 1. 15 pages.