Guava and CarrierX Partner to Bring 16 kHz HD Voice to AI Agents

Los Angeles-based Guava, a voice platform designed for regulated industries, has announced its production voice agents are now live on Long Beach-based CarrierX’s carrier network with AMR-WB 16 kHz wideband audio, the result of a partnership between the two companies aimed at enterprises in healthcare, financial services, insurance and other regulated sectors.

Voice conversations operate within a strict latency budget. When an AI agent responds too slowly, callers talk over it, repeat themselves or hang up. Call audio typically passes through multiple network intermediaries before reaching an AI system, and each hop adds delay.

CarrierX owns and operates its own carrier infrastructure with direct origination and termination, so calls reach Guava’s agents with fewer hops and less added latency.

Guava allocates that recovered latency to larger reasoning models, improving agent reliability on complex calls. The models draw on training from more than 10 billion live agent minutes in regulated production environments.

The architecture also simplifies security review. Fewer intermediaries mean a shorter answer to the question compliance teams ask first: Where does call data travel? Guava is SOC 2 Type II certified, HITRUST i1 certified and PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, with BAAs available for healthcare deployments. CarrierX operates its network at 99.99% uptime across more than 160 countries, carrying more than two billion calls monthly.

The AMR-WB 16 kHz standard delivers roughly twice the audio bandwidth of conventional narrowband telephony. CarrierX’s network was purpose-built to support HD audio, including transcoding for legacy systems.

“The low latency CarrierX engineered through its carrier infrastructure gives us a latency budget to spend on reasoning models. That budget converts directly into reliability, which is the metric that matters most for calls in regulated industries,” said Anthony Scodary, co-founder of Guava.

“I’ve been preaching the highest common denominator voice, and Guava’s use of our network is a perfect example of why it’s so valuable. We have the lowest latency possible on the highest quality signal, and the direct connection makes it the most secure. In AI and compute, every millisecond counts, and this proves it,” said David Erickson, founder and CEO of CarrierX.

Information for this article was sourced from Guava and CarrierX.