Competitor alerts on live calls: real-time agent assist from an AI listener
A sales-call demo built to show real-time agent assist: an AI listener rides along on a live call, notices when the customer names a competitor, and posts the alert to your server while the sentence is still being spoken. It never speaks into the call.
Also called conversation intelligence, live call monitoring AI, sales call intelligence, AI sidecar
The claim
The ai_sidecar SWML verb attaches a listening AI to a call it does not own. The listener hears both legs and treats the remote party as the customer. It has one tool, flag_competitor, which it calls when a name from a list is spoken. The tool handler records the mention and forwards it to a webhook of yours. The listener’s own speech channel is never used.
Why it holds
The demo’s offline run is the argument. run_demo.py replays a transcript against the detector and prints each alert beside the words that triggered it. The alert lands with nine words of the sentence still to come. The demo counts words rather than milliseconds on purpose: a position in the transcript is an observable fact, and a duration is a performance claim. A deployment is live at https://sidecar-demo.signalwire.me. Its routes let you feed a line of speech in and read the alerts back without a call.
How it works
The host is SWMLService, not AgentBase, because the listener does not run the conversation. The document is answer, then ai_sidecar, then hangup. The verb carries a prompt that names the competitors and a direction covering both legs. It sets customer_role to the remote caller, adds recognition hints for the names, and points web_hook_url at the tool. Lifecycle and transcription events arrive at /sidecar/events, and the sidecar’s LLM calls flag_competitor at /sidecar/swaig. A /simulate route runs the same detector path on typed text, and /timeline shows transcript and alerts on one clock. No SignalWire credentials are needed to run it. The platform calls the service; the service never calls out.
Limitations
ai_sidecar requires signalwire-sdk 3.4.1 or newer. It does not exist in the 3.0.1 the recipes here are verified against, which is why the sidecar recipe is planned rather than written. The larger signalwire-demos/sidecar demo adds a rep workspace, a live monitor and call records; this is the small one that goes with the quickstart. The repository carries no licence file at the time of writing, which is its owner’s to add.
What to change first
competitors.txt. The names are the whole domain. The verb, the tool and the event routes are the same for any list of words worth an alert.