How I Built an AI Voicemail System in 118 Lines (And What Surprised Me)

Last weekend I got mad at voicemail. Not at any individual voicemail — at the entire concept. Someone calls, leaves a 30-second message, and then I have to remember to check it. By the time I do, the urgent ones are old news and the spam ones have wasted my attention. So I built an AI that listens for me.

This post is about the build — what I chose, what I got wrong, and the two specific decisions that turned a flaky demo into something I'm actually comfortable shipping.

The canonical code example is in the Telnyx code examples repo:

https://github.com/team-telnyx/telnyx-code-examples/tree/main/ai-voicemail-transcription-forwarding-python

Picking the example

How I Built an AI Voicemail System in 118 Lines (And What Surprised Me)

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