# Speko is basically OpenRouter but for the voice AI stack > Source: > Published: 2026-08-17 16:32:34+00:00 # Speko is basically OpenRouter but for the voice AI stack Speko solves this by acting as an intelligent router. Instead of hardcoding your providers, you send a request specifying your constraints—whether you're optimizing for latency, cost, accuracy, or a balance of all three—along with the language and region. The platform then references its own benchmarked data to route the request to the winning combination of models. ## How the routing and failover work The technical implementation is designed to avoid the "control-plane lag" that kills the feeling of a real-time conversation. 1. **Optimization Request:** You define your criteria (e.g., "lowest latency" or "highest accuracy") and the target region. 2. **Model Selection:** The router filters through its public benchmarks to find the current winner for that specific combination. 3. **Session Prefetching:** To prevent the caller from waiting, the gateway prefetches signed session plans. This means the session connects to the provider directly from memory, skipping an extra round trip. 4. **Connection Failover:** Failover is handled strictly during the connection setup. If the primary provider rejects the attempt, the system immediately pivots to the runner-up model. For those who are worried about adding another network hop to their audio path or sharing API keys, they've open-sourced the gateway as a Go binary. You can run it as a sidecar in your container, communicating via a Unix socket to pin provider hosts and attach keys locally. ``` # Example of the gateway logic (Conceptual) # The Go binary runs as a sidecar, handling the local protocol # and attaching keys to the provider requests. ``` ## The benchmarking approach What makes this actually useful is the transparency of the data. They aren't just using "vibes" or short 30-second clips. Their benchmarks include ten-minute takes and spontaneous speech to see which models actually hold up over a long conversation. They've even trained an automatic scorer for TTS naturalness based on blind head-to-head human listening votes, which they claim matches human rater agreement levels. Since Speko doesn't train or sell its own models, the rankings remain impartial. This is a massive win for anyone building a real-world AI workflow where switching from a mediocre STT to a high-accuracy one can be the difference between a usable product and a frustrating one. If you're currently managing a complex voice stack, using a router like this turns a manual engineering task into a simple API call. ``` https://speko.ai/ ``` [Go is arguably the most AI-friendly language for modern backend 5d ago](/en/news/5940/) [Next Sainsbury's just paused AI cameras after a shopper got kicked out →](/en/news/6688/)