There was a window between the early 2000s and the late 2010s when self-hosted telephony made sense. But these days, there are so many cheap commercial services that it is almost impossible to justify the cost of maintaining your own voice infrastructure. Moreover, the proliferation of spam / scam calls has tarnished the perception phone interactions so much that most people avoid them at all costs.

And the few people who do still use the phone absolutely, unequivocally do not want to talk to an AI voice agent ever.

I set up Asterisk systems for a few small businesses in the mid-2000's (5 to 50 extensions.) It was seriously fun working with that stuff. These days I'll do almost anything to avoid phone calls.

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