We Built an AI Support Agent That Resolves 80% of Tickets — AssemblyAI

1,000 API signups a day and one onboarding engineer. So AssemblyAI built Joey. Matt Lawler, forward deployed engineer lead at AssemblyAI, shares how his team replaced an off-the-shelf support bot that resolved 10% of conversations with their own agent, Joey, which resolves 80% end to end for about $700 a month. Joey is built on the Claude Agent SDK with docs checked out as local markdown, embeddings for retrieval, agentic file search and a large CLAUDE.md. It's deployed on Railway so fixes ship in about 30 seconds. Then Matt gives Joey a voice with AssemblyAI's Voice Agent API and demos it live, making the case that FDEs should automate themselves out of a job and dogfood the product their customers build. In this talk: • Why the FDE model doesn't scale to 1,000 signups a day • Joey's architecture: local markdown docs, embeddings, agentic search and a single CLAUDE.md • Turning every escalation into a roadmap item for the agent • Adding real-time voice with one websocket: speech-to-text, LLM and text-to-speech SPEAKER Matt Lawler, Forward Deployed Engineer Lead, AssemblyAI LINKS AssemblyAI: https://www.assemblyai.com Voice Agent API docs: https://www.assemblyai.com/docs/voice-agents/voice-agent-api Introducing the Voice Agent API: https://www.assemblyai.com/blog/introducing-our-voice-agent-api AssemblyAI on X: https://x.com/assemblyai CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:33 Meet Matt 1:13 What AssemblyAI does 2:08 1,000 API signups a day 2:38 What a forward deployed engineer does 3:28 Why the FDE model doesn't scale 3:57 Automate yourself out of a job 4:12 The off-the-shelf bot: 10% resolution 5:17 Building Joey 6:12 Architecture: docs, embeddings, agentic search 7:22 Deploying on Railway 8:02 Results: 10% → 80% for $700 a month 9:01 Escalations become the roadmap 9:31 Giving Joey a voice 10:56 Code walkthrough 12:11 Live demo: talking to Joey 14:24 Dogfood your own product 15:08 Go build Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #VoiceAI #AIAgents #AIEngineer