If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance you’ve already tried the voice chat feature on this site. Maybe you clicked on it out of curiosity and found yourself having an actual conversation with the website.

If you’re curious about how the voice chat feature works, why it exists, or how it was built, this article is for you.

Voice agents are showing up everywhere. In my own experience, I’ve interacted with them across customer support, fast food restaurants, and travel services. What stands out is how natural these systems feel. They handle interruptions well, maintain context, and sound increasingly human, imperfections and all. At times, it genuinely feels like you’re interacting with another person.

Why I Built a Voice Assistant for This Site

I came across a website that used a voice-based concierge, and it was designed incredibly well. I was able to interact with the assistant to learn about the site, ask questions, and even navigate between pages using voice commands alone.

I loved the experience and decided to try to replicate that same functionality on my own website, both as a learning exercise and to recreate the user experience I had with that site.

What follows is my journey building it.

What It Took to Build This

When I started building the voice concierge for this site, I was already familiar with a number of voice and conversational AI products. I had seen different approaches, different demos, and different claims about what these systems could do. So the first thing I did was start experimenting.

I tried a variety of conversational AI and real-time voice solutions to understand how they actually behaved. It became clear pretty quickly that not all conversational systems are built for the same purpose.

Some systems are designed to operate within a defined scope. They rely on knowledge bases, predefined flows, and strict guardrails. They work well when the goal is to guide users through known paths and produce predictable outcomes.

Other systems are more open-ended. You can talk to them freely, much like typing into a large language model and receiving responses back. They are flexible and expressive, but they are not necessarily designed to take action or guide a user through a structured experience.

A website voice concierge sits somewhere in between.

It needs to feel conversational. It should greet you naturally, handle unexpected input, and respond professionally, even when the question has nothing to do with the site. At the same time, it has to be purposeful. It cannot lead users nowhere. It needs to understand the structure of the site, know what actions it can take, and guide visitors toward something concrete, like opening an article or navigating to a contact page.

Getting that balance right was one of the more interesting parts of the build.

Once the core conversational behavior was working, tuning became the real focus.

Interrupt handling was one of the first challenges. If the assistant is speaking and the user starts talking, what should happen? Should it stop immediately? Finish the sentence? Restart? Small decisions like this have a noticeable impact on how natural the interaction feels.

Audio adds another layer of complexity. The system speaks while the microphone is open and listening. Without careful tuning, it can hear itself, interrupt itself, or get stuck in loops where it struggles to detect real user input. This is even more noticeable on mobile devices, where background noise and microphone quality vary significantly.

Device differences matter. What works well on a quiet desktop setup may struggle on a phone in a noisy environment. Making the experience feel consistent across devices required careful adjustment.

There is also session management. A voice session should not run indefinitely. If there is no activity, it needs to end cleanly. If the user is finished, it should close gracefully. This is important for user experience, but also for practical reasons like resource usage and cost control.

In the end, the biggest takeaway was that the difference between an experience that feels okay and one that feels great comes down to the details. Timing, interruption handling, audio tuning, and clear boundaries all matter more than you initially expect.

How Voice Changed the Website Experience

Most websites rely heavily on content and visual design to communicate what they are about and how visitors should navigate them. That still matters. Thoughtful layout, clear writing, and good information architecture are important.

Voice changes the dynamic.

Instead of asking visitors to figure out where to click or what to read first, voice allows them to simply say what they are looking for. The experience becomes more personal and more direct. The site responds to intent instead of forcing users to adapt to its structure.

What I found interesting is that people often ask questions they would never try to answer by scanning a page. Voice lowers that barrier. It invites exploration in a way that feels natural and lightweight, especially for visitors who are not quite sure where to start.

At the same time, voice is not a solution for everything. Not everyone wants to speak out loud. Sometimes reading is faster. Sometimes silence is better. In my experience, voice works best when it complements existing design rather than trying to replace it. It adds another way in, one that feels more conversational and more human.

Looking Ahead

Voice-based interfaces are still evolving quickly. They are getting faster, more reliable, and better at understanding context. As that continues, I expect to see more sites experimenting with conversational experiences that feel less like tools and more like interactions.

This voice concierge will continue to change as well. I plan to keep experimenting, tuning behaviors, and exploring what feels useful versus what feels unnecessary. The goal is not novelty. The goal is to make interacting with a site feel easier and more intuitive.

If you are thinking about building something similar, whether for a personal site or a product, and want to compare notes or talk through trade-offs, feel free to get in touch. I am always happy to share what I have learned.

And if you’ve made it this far, say “open sesame” to the voice assistant and see what happens.