Eight weeks. That's how long it took our team at Autor to go from "we should build a voice AI receptionist for healthcare clinics" to handling live patient calls in production. Not a demo. Not a prototype collecting dust on a staging server. A real system answering real phones at real dental and healthcare clinics across Canada. The product is called Loquent. It now handles thousands of automated calls per month, 24/7, for healthcare and dental clients. But the interesting part isn't what it does today — it's the 47 decisions we made in those 8 weeks that determined whether it would work at all. Here's every major technical and product decision we made, why we made it, and what we'd change if we did it again. Week 1–2: Picking the Stack The first decision was the voice pipeline. We needed three things: a way to receive phone calls, a way to convert speech to text, and a way to convert text back to speech. Simple enough on paper. For telephony, we went with Twilio .…