Switchboard is a modular audio SDK and real-time runtime that makes it easy to build audio- and voice-powered applications. It helps developers create low-latency, AI-enabled audio experiences that can run on-device, in the cloud, or both.

Switchboard uses an audio graph model. Each graph is a JSON-defined pipeline of modular audio building blocks like STT, TTS, noise suppression, voice changers, etc. These blocks can be chained together and run in real time.

Switchboard is a modular audio framework incorporating a large library of audio nodes AudioNode. These nodes can easily be put together into audio graphs AudioGraph. Switchboard passes these graphs into natively compiled C++ code that runs fast, across multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, web, and embedded platforms.

Audio graphs can be defined in JSON or native languages, making them easy to build while providing complete flexibility at runtime.

Switchboard also has a visual (no-code) node-based editor, the Switchboard Editor, which generates JSON automatically for rapid configuration of audio graphs that can easily be designed and tested in the browser and deployed to many target platforms.

It also allows you to tune parameters for each node or change the audio graph at runtime, rapidly speeding up development cycles.

Audio nodes are essentially modular containers that process audio and include a wide range of functions such as: speech to text, text to speech, large language models, voice changers, media players, streaming, voice and video calling, the ability to mix and split audio streams, DSP effects, and much more.

Switchboard also includes Extensions to many other popular audio tools and SDKs, both open and closed source.

Switchboard runs on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, and the web. It supports edge compute, embedded systems, and hybrid architectures.

Whether you’re using it for a single node such as speech-to-text or a voice changer, or stringing multiple nodes together, Switchboard will:

• make it faster and easier to build, test, experiment, and get to market

• make it easier to maintain and make changes later

• save time and money

• drive new revenue and growth by simplifying the addition of new features

• AI Agent and Voice AI solutions developers

• Real Time Communications (RTC) applications

• Music and social app developers

• R&D / ML / AI teams looking to commercialize

• Hardware projects like headphones, speakers, wearables, etc.

• Pro audio industry - hardware and software

• Apps & SDKs with voice, VoIP, media players, and other audio features

• Product managers looking for a no code prototyping tool (Switchboard Editor)

See Use Cases in main menu for more details
.

Yes. Switchboard is ideal for running LLM-powered voice agents on-device or hybrid. It supports real-time STT → LLM → TTS pipelines, and gives you full control over audio routing, DSP, and model selection.

Switchboard lets you embed voice control, transcription, and audio effects into mobile apps without relying on cloud APIs. It supports real-time pipelines optimized for low latency and power usage.

Yes. You can bring your own noise suppression model (or use built-ins), and chain it with compressors, equalizers, or echo cancellation using Switchboard’s modular graph.

Yes. Switchboard is compatible with WebRTC, LiveKit, Agora, and other voice and video chat frameworks. You can use it to build social audio rooms, watch parties, or spatial audio multiplayer environments.

You can start using Switchboard in two complementary ways:

1. SDK Libraries

Visit our Docs Downloads page, and select the individual libraries needed for your platform.

2. Switchboard Editor

Use the Switchboard Editor, a browser-based tool to visually construct and test audio pipelines without writing code.

These methods work well together. You can visually prototype your audio pipeline using the Editor, which generates JSON configurations. Then, implement these configurations with the SDK libraries on your target platforms. This approach ensures your audio experiences sound consistent everywhere.

Note that while the Editor covers most functionalities, you may still need to use SDK libraries directly for advanced capabilities.

Graphs are defined using a simple JSON schema. Each node specifies a module (e.g. TTS, media player, effect), its config, and its connections. You can create graphs by hand or with the Switchboard Graph Editor (GUI).

• Swift / Kotlin / JavaScript (bindings)

• C++ core engine

• Python

• WebAssembly (limited)

• Switchboard also supports frameworks such as React Native, Flutter, Unity etc.

See our SDK API reference and integration.

All documentation, SDKs, and example graphs are on the Switchboard Docs Portal. You’ll find copy-pasteable starter graphs, pre-built modules, and real-time testing tools.

For general inquiries and help, submit a request on our Contact page.

For existing customers, you can contact us directly via email.

For enterprise customers we’ll be happy to set up a private Slack channel for live support.

Use npm (for JS), CocoaPods (iOS), or Gradle (Android). Prebuilt binaries are also available for C++, with support for native integration. If you can’t find the answer in our Docs portal, please Contact us.

• Some parts of the SDK are Open Source. See Introduction page.

• We offer world class support and broader consulting services through our parent company, Synervoz. Having this support interface (e.g. via a shared Slack channel) is a huge help for urgent requests and should help mitigate risk overall.

• Escrow is another option we are open to, but only for sizable enterprise deals.

Yes. You can plug in your own models, compiled to ONNX or other formats. Many open-source models already work out of the box (e.g. Whisper, Silero, RNNoise, etc.), and Switchboard provides extension templates for C++ and WebAssembly.

Switchboard can ingest or output audio to WebRTC-compatible frameworks like LiveKit using media streams. Example integrations and a full LiveKit demo are available in the Switchboard GitHub repo and in the Examples page of our docs portal.

Yes. Switchboard supports fully offline audio processing pipelines for mobile, desktop, and embedded. This is perfect for apps that need privacy, low latency, or function in poor network conditions. Many nodes in Switchboard are on-device capable.

Agora and Twilio focus on cloud-hosted communications. Switchboard gives you control over audio processing, routing, and ML—locally or hybrid—making it ideal for more advanced or privacy-sensitive applications. Agora and other VoIP services are available as nodes in Switchboard. They normally function as an audio source (e.g. you can take the audio from a voice / video chat room) or a sink (you can put audio into the room). In short, you wouldn’t use Switchboard instead of either of these services, you’d use it in addition.

Vapi and Switchboard serve different purposes. Vapi focuses on helping developers build agents, while Switchboard helps developers build audio graphs.

You could potentially use both Vapi and Switchboard in your project. For example, you might prototype an agent in Vapi. You might then use Switchboard to optimize an on-device audio graph to save on API costs or introduce more flexibility or to process audio in other ways that are not provided for as part of the Vapi platform.

Switchboard is a modular audio SDK and runtime that gives developers full control over the audio pipeline, letting them build custom real-time graphs with components like STT, TTS, voice changers, and noise suppression that run on-device, in the cloud, or in hybrid mode.

In contrast, Vapi is a hosted voice agent platform focused on telephony use cases, offering a pre-built stack that integrates APIs like ElevenLabs and Deepgram but limits customization and runs entirely in the cloud.

Switchboard is an SDK and runtime for building entire audio pipelines, while Deepgram and Assembly AI focus on individual components such as speech recognition. So, whereas companies like Deepgram and AssemblyAI provide their own speech to text (STT), text to speech (TTS), and related nodes, Switchboard lets developers combine these nodes, as well as many others (voice, music, and other audio related nodes) in a real-time audio graphs that can run on-device, in the cloud, or hybrid. Deepgram and AssemblyAI are typically cloud-only APIs that specialize in speech-to-text (and some related features) with little control over the underlying pipeline. With Switchboard, you can bring your own models, run them offline, chain multiple models or effects, and integrate with WebRTC or embedded devices—offering far greater flexibility, privacy, and lower latency than relying solely on hosted APIs. That said, you can run Switchboard graphs with nodes from Deepgram or AssemblyAI.

Switchboard is an SDK and runtime for building entire audio pipelines, while Cartesia and Eleven Labs focus on individual components such as speech recognition or text to speech. You can run Switchboard graphs that use Cartesia or Eleven Labs nodes. For example, you can use the Cartesia extension for Switchboard.

Switchboard and LiveKit solve different layers of the real-time media stack. LiveKit is a powerful open-source infrastructure for media transport—handling audio/video routing, SFU/relay, and room-based sessions over WebRTC. Switchboard, on the other hand, is focused on audio processing and orchestration at the endpoint: voice activity detection, STT, TTS, noise suppression, LLM integration, and more. You can use them together—Switchboard for local audio graph processing (on-device or with cloud-connected nodes), and LiveKit to handle routing audio between multiple users. Switchboard doesn't replace LiveKit—it extends it by giving developers real-time, programmable control over what happens to the audio before or after it's streamed (see our Partners/LiveKit ). It’s similar with Daily.co and other webRTC providers. We offer some Extensions already and will continue adding more.

JUCE is a low-level C++ framework primarily used for building cross-platform audio applications, especially VST plugins and desktop DAWs. It provides powerful building blocks for UI, audio I/O, and DSP, but it requires deep expertise in C++ and lacks out-of-the-box support for real-time voice AI, on-device STT/TTS, or modular graph-based orchestration. Switchboard, by contrast, is a higher-level SDK and runtime focused on real-time audio and AI pipelines—with language bindings in Swift, Kotlin, and JS, plus support for live graph editing, bring-your-own-models, and hybrid cloud/on-device execution. Switchboard accelerates development for teams building voice-controlled apps, agents, or DSP tools—without the boilerplate and low-level threading work required in JUCE.

PortAudio is a low-level cross-platform audio I/O library used to route audio to and from hardware devices. It’s ideal for simple stream management, but it offers no built-in DSP, audio graph management, or support for real-time speech and AI tasks. Switchboard, on the other hand, offers higher level abstractions—providing a modular audio runtime with real-time graph orchestration, support for AI models (STT, TTS, voice changers), and tight integration with mobile, desktop, web, and embedded platforms. While PortAudio is like wiring raw audio cables, Switchboard is like building a fully programmable audio processing studio—letting developers prototype and deploy advanced pipelines without writing audio I/O code from scratch.

Switchboard has a free tier up to 20K activations and Commercial Licenses available thereafter.

Consult our Pricing page.

Typically you would contract directly with the third party extension provider.

Nevertheless we have partnerships with certain providers so we encourage you to get in touch to discuss your use case and the extensions you’d like to use, as we may be able to help.

• Some aspects of Switchboard are already Open Source. You can learn more about this on our Introduction page.

• We also provide Example apps that are Open Source.

• We plan to continue our FOSS contributions and welcome partners to get in touch.

• For the closed-source aspects of Switchboard, we may offer partial source code licenses based on your needs. This option is generally cheaper, faster, and more robust than developing it yourself. Pricing typically ranges from $XX,000 to $XXX,000, depending on the modules required.

Yes. Switchboard offers a free tier with full access to the SDK and limited usage caps. Switchboard supports many independent developers and zero cost prototyping through to launch. Generally limits are only hit as deployed apps start to scale, or if support is required.

Yes, Switchboard’s licensing is designed for commercial deployment. It scales from indie apps to enterprise use cases. See our pricing page.

We open source a lot of example apps, starter templates, and other tools including the bring your own extension framework. The platform specific SDKs are generally closed source, though parts of it may be open sourced in the near future. The full commercial SDK is available under a flexible developer-friendly license. Partial source code licenses are also an option for larger customers. Contact the Switchboard team for custom pricing.

Yes, Switchboard is a proprietary technology. However, we offer a free tier — please see our Pricing page and Master License Agreement for more details.

We also provide open source example applications. You are responsible for reading the license files contained with any distribution package.

We do our best to keep things simple and reasonable, while also supporting the open source community where possible.

Depending on what you build, it might also require a patent license. See Patents page.

We can provide this option if needed, but it is available only at the enterprise tier and will incur additional costs.

Otherwise, we offer support on a best-effort basis, and typically recommend a monthly support package to address this concern.

Yes we provide a variety of consulting services through our parent company, Synervoz.

Yes. Embedded is a key target for Switchboard. Current builds already support ARM platforms and edge deployments. Optimizations for low-power devices are actively being developed.

Yes. Switchboard already supports RAG and hybrid inference using local + cloud LLMs. Switchboard is not focusing on providing tools for prompt orchestration or conversational memory but these features can be obtained from other platforms, and your agents can be connected into your Switchboard audio graph. We are also able to help with custom development as needed. Contact us to learn more.

Yes. The modular graph system allows orchestration across multiple models. So, for example, you might run a real time speech to speech pipeline in parallel with a speech to text / LLM pipeline that records and summarizes the conversation.