u/xeneks

Background:

I've been trying to get a voice phone number for my openclaw so I can call it and it can call me, and the voice call feature is absolutely perfect for my needs, as it can expose full openclaw features.

So I can get midnight calls if my stockmarket trackers see a big shift, or if a critical email comes in from overseas in the early hours, or if I get a message from someone in a different timezone that I have to respond to, such as money requests from children or relatives etc.

But I'm in Australia, and with a Telnyx Australian phone number, openAI handling the voice, and the Openclaw at my home (not on VPS in USA), the supported hard-coded codec PCMU (Ulaw or G.711u) fails on the transcontinental links back and forth.

Like, always, always clipping due to the torturous, long path. So while voice-call plugin is perfect, it just doesn't work in Australia unless I put my Openclaw in the USA, and even then, while Telnyx supports Opus codec, Openclaw doesn't so I'd need some sort of transcoding feature so Opus can go in & out of my Openclaw voice call plugin, and truly, I can't program that myself, probably even with codex helping.

So, I tried the xAI new voice call agent, and set it all up and got it working with my super cheap Telnyx Australia number. So I call it, and wow, absolutely beautiful voices, super fast, zero latency or clicks or drops or crackling/clipping. Just stunning.

But it's not my claw.

So I used their GUI no-code tool to setup the API post call to my /responses on my openclaw box, and .. I got it working! But only once out of 15 tries now. I had codex dig into the issues and the problem is that only once was the Openclaw response less than ten seconds, and xAI's voice agent API call feature gives up after precisely ten seconds.

Nearly always, my Openclaw on my desk computer takes longer than 15 seconds to get even the simplest query out back to xAI's voice agent api call. Also, the tool builder feature at xAI's voice call agent setup, only supports api calls. No MCP. And that API has no setting for 'wait time' or 'timeout'.

So now I'm stuck. Unworkable audio using voice-call feature, or beautiful audio but no access to my Openclaw.

So what am I missing?

I want realtime conversations with my claw, and I want it to call me if something comes up from one of the many regular crons it's got happening, that are the 'heavy purpose' that it has. One of them is a 'go fishing now' tracker.

What do I do? How do I make this work?

If I can't get it to work for me, I can't get it to work for family (such as mum who's a farmer and struggles with tech) or friends, and I can't sell it to anyone, such as small businesses or professionals.

We have all this PII (personally identifiable information) legislation so I need the Openclaw to actually be in Australia, but the best voice services are all in the USA, so that's transpacific hops a couple of times, not including all the hops for the actual AI models.

It's like being stuck in the fringes, or with great power on the verge of working, but always spluttering out. Surely there's something obvious I have miss-thought or have totally wrong, or some tweak I can make? Help!