Uttera wasn't born from a business plan. It was born from a company with an extremely boring and very expensive problem.
A long-established Spanish family business group. The kind that has been doing its thing for decades and where the telephone is still the main channel: orders, incidents, suppliers, deadlines, agreements closed by talking.
Those calls were recorded, as in so many places. And as in so many places, nobody listened to them. Listening to a call costs as long as the call lasted, so the recording served exactly one purpose: going to find it once there was already a problem and somebody remembered, more or less, what day it was.
Everything else was lost. What was agreed and not written down. What a customer said three times before getting angry. The detail that was at minute 14 and that nobody was going to find.
It wasn't a technology problem. It was a problem of there being no hours to listen to what you already have recorded.
The idea wasn't original: transcribe those calls, summarize them, and leave the result where the work happens. What turned out to be less obvious was everything else.
The obvious thing was tried first: send the audio to an outside service. And that's where the first real decision appeared, and it wasn't technical. Those recordings contain customer names, prices, terms, and conversations somebody had assuming they stayed in the house. Sending them out to be processed, to a place that would also keep them for an indeterminate time and might use them for training, wasn't a cost decision: it was a decision about who you're handing your company's archive to.
So it was built in-house. With our own graphics cards, with the open models that already existed, and with the starting rule that the audio doesn't leave here.
Then came the tedious part, which is where the time actually goes: making it hold a normal day's volume, not fall over on a Friday afternoon, cost something reasonable per hour of audio, make Spanish sound like Spanish, and not leave a three-hour recording half done.
Because it worked, and because the conversation kept repeating.
When an internal tool has spent a while solving a real problem, somebody from outside always turns up with the same problem. Another company with another phone that never stops, a law firm, an accountancy. And the question is always the same: "could you set that up for me?"
From there the decision was one of the easy ones: turn into a service what was already built and proven over months with real data, instead of starting from scratch with a pretty idea.
Almost everything, honestly. And above all it explains what may look eccentric:
Why the audio isn't stored. It isn't a policy drafted by a legal department to stand out. It's that the first version was built precisely so it wouldn't leave the house, and changing that on starting to sell would have betrayed the reason it existed.
Why billing is per second and not per request. Because the first user was the same one paying the electricity bill for the graphics cards, and there the natural unit is obvious.
Why there are phone system connectors before anything else. Because the original problem was telephony. The two Asterisk AGI scripts we publish aren't an example written for the blog: they're the code that solved this.
Why the engines are published under an open license. Because when you build something for your own house, you want to be able to audit it and not depend on anyone. Publishing it extended that same guarantee to whoever hires us — and that's why you can run it yourself without paying us a cent.
And why we insist so much on what we don't do. Because the conversation that started all of this was exactly that one: who are we giving these recordings to?
Who the company is. Not because there's anything to hide, but because their calls are theirs and not marketing material of ours — which is precisely the principle that made Uttera exist.
When there's a customer who wants to tell their case with their name on it, we'll tell it with their name and their numbers. Until then, we'd rather have an honest anonymous origin than an invented success story.
Anything to add or correct? Write to support@uttera.ai. If you correct us, we edit the post and credit you.
Uttera