Hi HN,
About two years ago, I started working as an independent contractor on a large voice application where we needed much deeper insight into phone calls than the existing platforms could provide.
We wanted to answer questions like:
- How long was the caller waiting in the queue? * Which agent rejected or missed the call? * How many times was the call transferred? * Who transferred it, and when? * What actually happened during the conversation? Getting this information turned out to be surprisingly difficult.
During the project, we integrated with multiple communication providers. While they handled voice reliably, I found the developer experience frustrating. Simple workflows often required several API calls, some data wasn’t exposed at all, and call recordings weren’t always reliable. No web hooks, all apis were polling. We even ended up recording audio locally on every agent’s computer just to avoid missing conversations, but that meant losing valuable server side context like transfers, queue events, and routing decisions.
What surprised me was that while the telephony side was incredibly mature, the developer experience often wasn’t.
So I built a proof of concept that moved the SIP signaling and media handling under our control instead of relying entirely on external platforms.
Once we owned the voice infrastructure, everything became much simpler.
We could generate a complete timeline of every call, reliably record both participants in separate channels, produce diarized transcripts, generate AI summaries and analysis, implement the IETF vCon standard (vCon), and expose clean APIs that made embedding a browser-based dialer inside CRMs straightforward.
What started as a proof of concept to gain better visibility into phone calls eventually grew into Comcent.
Today, Comcent Community Edition includes:
- SIP Voice Infrastructure * AI-Powered Call Analysis * Diarized Call Transcripts * Daily Summaries * SIP-Aware Voice Bots * Privacy-First Deployment * Support for the IETF vCon standard (vCon) * A browser dialer that can be embedded into existing web applications After spending nearly two years building it, I wanted to put it in the hands of developers. Open-sourcing the Community Edition felt like the fastest way to gather real-world feedback, build trust, and continue improving the platform.
I also recorded a walkthrough showing the complete deployment, from a fresh virtual machine to making the first phone call.
Walkthrough: [https://youtu.be/Cm4JDB95vpI](https://youtu.be/Cm4JDB95vpI)
GitHub: [https://github.com/comcent-io/comcent-ce](https://github.com/comcent-io/comcent-ce)
I’d really appreciate technical feedback, criticism, feature requests, bug reports, or pull requests. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture or implementation.
Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48829604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48829604)
Points: 1