What is CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service)?
CPaaS is a cloud service that exposes calling, messaging and video through APIs so developers can add communications to applications without running telephony infrastructure. Twilio and Exotel are well-known examples.
Also known as: communications API, telephony API
How it works
A CPaaS provider owns carrier connections and exposes them as APIs: buy a number, place a call, receive a webhook when one arrives, stream the audio. Developers assemble these primitives into products. It is the plumbing layer, not the conversation layer.
CPaaS versus voice AI platform
A CPaaS gives you a call and audio. A voice AI platform adds the listening, thinking and speaking on top. Building your own agent on a CPaaS means integrating recognition, a language model, synthesis, turn-taking and analytics yourself; a voice AI platform packages that and often connects to your existing CPaaS account.
Common mistake
Treating the CPaaS price as the total cost of a call. Per-minute telephony is only one line. Recognition, model and synthesis usage, plus engineering time for latency tuning, usually matter more at scale.
Where this shows up at Vaami
Vaami integrates with CPaaS and carrier accounts, and works with providers such as Twilio and Exotel in bring-your-own-telephony mode.
See it on a real call.
Hear how a Vaami voice agent handles this on a live conversation in your language and your use case.