ClueCon 2025 is officially in the books! From hands-on coding challenges to insightful talks, late-night networking, and a milestone 20th birthday for FreeSWITCH, this year’s conference captured everything we love about bringing the telecom and open-source community together.

Whether you joined us in Chicago or followed along online, here’s a look back at the highlights from four unforgettable days.

Day 1: The Coder Games

We kicked things off with our annual Coder Games hack-a-thon, a day devoted to hands-on challenges for builders of all levels. Participants worked solo or in teams, competing for prizes ranging from ClueCon-themed board games to Beats headphones, and even a Nintendo Switch.

Maker Challenge
The Maker Challenge brings hardware into the spotlight, inviting attendees to build Arduino-powered devices that respond to real-time phone calls or SMS using SignalWire APIs.

FreeCYCLED Hacks
In this year’s FreeCYCLED Hacks challenge, attendees built working carnival games from household materials. Attendees lined up to play each of the games and vote for their favorites. The crowd pick was a fortune teller that predicts your tech future.

SignalWire Challenge & AI workshops
The SignalWire Challenge tasked developers with building AI-powered voice bots to troll spam callers using context-aware dialogue. To help, AI workshops throughout the day covered everything from building low-latency voice agents in Python to PCI-compliant payment collection and triggering real-world hardware with AI.

We wrapped the day with the Welcome Dinner at Giordano’s, where attendees enjoyed classic Chicago deep-dish pizza, recharged from the day’s activities, and networked ahead of the week to come.

Day 2: Keynotes, partnerships, and a 20th birthday party

Tuesday opened with Anthony Minessale’s keynote, where he reflected on two decades of FreeSWITCH innovation and demoed a low-latency AI voice agent. Throughout the day, we heard from leaders in open-source telecom, including Kamailio, Asterisk, and FreeSWITCH contributors.

Major announcement: SignalWire + AWS
SignalWire announced a new partnership with Amazon Web Services, integrating AWS’s Nova Sonic voice-to-voice AI model into the SignalWire platform. This collaboration adds a new amazon_bedrock verb to SignalWire Markup Language (SWML) and brings advanced speech-to-speech capabilities to developers worldwide.

The Gigabit Reception: 20 years of FreeSWITCH
We closed the day with the annual Gigabit Reception, this year honoring FreeSWITCH’s 20th anniversary with cake, drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and the annual jam session.

Day 3: AI in the real world

AI dominated Wednesday’s sessions, with deep dives into real-world deployments, latency optimization, and the realities of building production-ready AI voice systems.

AI Roundtable
Industry leaders got candid about what works (and what doesn’t) in live telecom environments, covering hallucination prevention, conversational accuracy, and lessons learned from shipping AI-powered products.

New tools for developers
SignalWire announced the Developer Voice Toolkit and Sigmond, a new in-dashboard AI assistant, to help developers build and deploy real-time applications faster than ever.

The evening brought Game Night, complete with arcade games, board games, snacks, drinks, and the highly-anticipated ClueCon karaoke.

Day 4: Closing talks, Dangerous Demos, and big prizes

The final day featured practical talks from across the telecom world, including the HOMER project at QXIP and a founder who built his business entirely on FreeSWITCH.

Dangerous Demos
James Body returned to host the high-stakes, crash-or-win event where participants have three minutes to impress or fail spectacularly. Highlights included a FreeSWITCH vs. Asterisk showdown and an AI agent singing “Happy Birthday” to Anthony Minessale.

Grand prize giveaway
We wrapped up with our annual raffle for a custom-engraved MacBook Air. Remember… registering early for ClueCon 2026 earns you extra tickets (and chances to win)!

Bonus announcements you might have missed

• SignalWire WhatsApp Integration (early access) is now in alpha, enabling inbound and outbound WhatsApp messaging inside the SignalWire ecosystem.
  

• Open Beta: Call Fabric SDK + Reference App is SignalWire's fully open-source SDK for building real-time communications and AI voice apps across web, iOS, and Android.

See you in 2026!

If you missed a session, recordings will be available soon on the FreeSWITCH YouTube channel. Subscribe so you don’t miss it when we post them!

Thank you to everyone who joined us for ClueCon 2025. We can’t wait to see you next year! Early bird tickets will be available soon, so keep an eye out for this ultimate deal on ClueCon registration.