Last week, I had the great honor of representing the OpenSIPS Project in the ClueCon 2025 IT & Telephony conference:
As always, the event took place in the “windy” city of Chicago, this time returning to the Swissôtel. Fun fact: “windy” isn’t related to the city’s weather, rather to its former politicians who were quite vocal but also … full of hot air!). And the star of the event was none other than FreeSWITCH! This year, we celebrated its 20th anniversary (yes, there was cake too!), as the source code’s first publicly posted version dates back to 2005.
Event Unfolding
The conference started on Monday around 09:00 local time. It offered four full days of technical presentations and demos. There were also coffee breaks and evening events, which fostered networking.
On the open-source telephony front, there was a diverse representation of projects. FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, OpenSIPS, and Kamailio all had talks or “Lunch n Learn” practical sessions, covering latest developments. These sessions are great opportunities to get in direct contact with the developer(s) and connect.
With AI being such a hot topic nowadays, it had a good infiltration throughout the presentations. We saw several companies showcasing their AI products, services and/or use-cases. To name a few: SignalWire and their new Agents SDK, Ecosmob’s Voicebots, Rime’s realistic speech models, Arcee’s powerful yet affordable LLMs, etc. Emerging AI tools & databases which were showcased or mentioned include: Claude.AI, Cerebras.AI, Hugging Face, etc.
Last but not least, connected topics such as Architecture, Security and Monitoring were there to round up the talk spectrum. And companies such as Enable Security (with their pentesting suites and RTP vulnerability advisories and mitigation strategies) or QXIP (with the new Homer 11 observability suite) were there to present the latest and greatest on how to achieve each, respectively.
Conclusions
One big take-away is that all these years have lead to a healthy, robust and reliable ecosystem of open-source telephony technologies. In 2025, not only are there VoIP projects catering to any of your needs… but each of them is also heavily tried & tested by its community! VoIP system developers and architects have hundreds of collective years of experience on the human side. Additionally, their codebases each have trillions of routed minutes. As a result, open-source VoIP has slowly matured into carrier-grade levels of compliance, flexibility and performance.
The other take-away is, of course, related to AI. Each year makes the AI telephony agents even more lifelike — their choice of words, their comprehension and pronunciation abilities. And on the service side, the engineering techniques on reducing the agents’ response latency are also continuously evolving. How far are we from a future time where we will not anymore be able to distinguish between an AI agent and a human? Here and there, we occasionally realize with a smile that we’re actually not that far off.
Thank you ClueCon & SignalWire for the invitation. I had a blast and I’m already looking ahead to seeing you next year!
Drops of wisdom, knowledge and news from OpenSIPS 