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How Relay Hawk Launched an AI Voice Studio in Record Time | SignalWire
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How Relay Hawk Launched an AI Voice Studio in Record Time

Case study: Relay Hawk

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“We were able to accomplish what our customers needed a lot more quickly with SignalWire AI than with other standalone call flow systems.”

- Justin Massey, Founder and CEO, Relay Hawk

Overview

Relay Hawk helps answering services and call centers rapidly deploy AI phone bots tailored to specific customer needs. After hitting roadblocks with legacy LLM-based workflows, CEO Justin Massey turned to SignalWire AI.

A solo founder working by himself, Massey built a production-grade voice agent studio in 5 months. This studio integrates with call centers and handles transfers and escalations to humans reliably.

With SignalWire AI, Massey moved away from rigid flowcharts in favor of a flexible, prompt-based development model This shift to plain-text prompts drastically reduced development time so he could focus on customer outcomes instead of infrastructure.


About Relay Hawk

Relay Hawk modernizes call centers’ tech stack with conversational AI and agentic workflows. With an AI IVR overlay that integrates with existing systems, call centers can deploy low-latency AI phone agents that triage routine calls and escalate complex cases to human agents without replacing any of their core infrastructure.

Massey didn’t initially set out to build a product. His original plan was to educate mid-sized contact center owners on how to adopt AI before AI-native competitors left them behind. But as he explored what it would take to deliver production-quality voice agents himself, testing solutions like Twilio and OpenAI, it became clear that stitching together the voice AI stack with low enough latency for lifelike conversations was nearly impossible.

The Challenge

Relay Hawk's potential customers were mid-sized contact centers that handled inbound and outbound calls on behalf of other companies and government organizations. These contact centers were losing customers to AI-first offerings. Massey planned to create an online course, teaching them to build their own AI voice agents.

In his learning process, Massey initially relied on standard LLMs, integrating with OpenAI to infer possible caller paths and journeys in call flows. But this approach introduced several pain points:

  • Flows were too strict, requiring tight definitions of every possible user path.

  • Iteration was slow, with every change needing diagram and integration updates.

  • Telephony overhead like handling WebSockets, SIP, and latency became a bottleneck.

  • There was no easy way to scale conversational complexity or respond dynamically to callers.

The Solution

After testing SignalWire and discovering how much lower the latency was, he realized the bigger opportunity: build a new product. Not just a single voice agent, but a platform for building multiple voice agents. These are sometimes known as “agent studios” or AI IVRs. With SignalWire, invoking the entire voice AI pipeline was a few lines of code. Phone bot behavior could be defined using natural language prompts and easy-to-read markup, without having to define every possible path of the call flow.

By replacing rigid workflows with natural language prompts and letting SignalWire handle the telephony stack, Relay Hawk was able to ship faster and scale. Prompt-based control over call flows makes changes fast and flexible, while there is no need to manage infrastructure. SignalWire handles SIP and audio quality, delivering a low latency end result.

Results

Massey built a platform for building and customizing voice agents, a whole agent studio, as a solo founder. Not only did SignalWire give him a much faster path to market, it also facilitated a much tighter iterative cycle. The voice AI market changes very fast, and he could adapt his roadmap to customer feedback and market changes in hours or days instead of weeks or months.

Faster delivery and lower latency

Bots that used to take days to design and ship now go live in hours, keeping Relay Hawk’s customers ahead of schedule, while the bots themselves respond in conversation more quickly. Thanks to low latency and high quality voices, conversation flows are more natural. Building all by himself, Justin had a prototype in 2 weeks and a full fledged SaaS product in 4 months. He signed his first contact center customers 5 months after deciding to build.

Focus on the caller

With infrastructure abstracted away, Massey focuses entirely on improving caller experience and AI interaction quality.

Telephony done for you

SignalWire’s implementation of the Programmable Unified Communications (PUC) model handles the heavy lifting—routing, SIP, PSTN, audio latency—so developers don’t have to.


“I don't have any desire to deal with the underlying telephony if it's been solved in a good way. Where the calls are low-latency, I'm willing to pay a price for that. It saves me time and allows me to ship faster.”

- Justin Massey, Founder and CEO, Relay Hawk

Learn more about Relay Hawk here.