February 9, 2026·12 min readI’ve spent the last six months working on a startup, building agent prototypes for one of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world. As part of that work, our team relied on off-the-shelf voice agent platforms to help the company operate more effectively. Though I can’t go into the business details, the technical takeaway was clear: voice agents are powerful, and there are brilliant off-the-shelf abstractions like Vapi and ElevenLabs that make spinnin...