The Voice Agent Testing Problem Nobody Talks About
Every voice AI team hits the same wall: your agent works in demos, but production is a different story. Users have accents. They interrupt. Background noise makes transcription unreliable. Your agent that sounded perfect yesterday now fails 30% of calls.
The real problem isn't building voice agents—it's knowing when they're actually ready for production.
Quick filter: If your demo looks great but real calls feel messy, you need better evaluation.
Teams try three approaches, and all fail at scale:
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Manual QA — Works for 10 calls. Completely breaks at 1,000. Your QA team can't test every edge case, accent, and interruption pattern.
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Built-in platform testing — VAPI, Retell, and other platforms offer testing features, but their results are inconsistent. Pass/fail reasoning often doesn't correlate with actual behavior because they use cheaper models for evaluation.
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Homegrown solutions — Your engineers spend months building test infrastructure instead of improving your agent. And you still can't trust the results.
Hamming solves this by being purpose-built for one thing: making voice agent testing as reliable as the agents you're trying to build.
Why Teams Choose Hamming Over Alternatives
| Differentiator | How it works | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Consistent evaluation | Audio-based, two-step relevance checks | Fewer false failures |
| Enterprise security | RBAC, SSO, audit logs, BAA options | Compliance-ready testing |
| Scale and CI/CD | Parallel runs and deploy gating | Faster, safer releases |
Consistent, Repeatable Results
The #1 complaint we hear from teams switching to Hamming: "Our previous testing tool gave inconsistent results—the reasoning didn't match the pass/fail."
Hamming achieves 95-96% agreement with human evaluators. Here's why:
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Audio-based evaluation — We analyze actual audio, not just transcripts. This catches pronunciation issues, interruption handling, and latency problems that text-only evaluation misses.
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Two-step evaluation pipeline — First we determine relevancy (should this assertion even apply to this call?), then we evaluate. This eliminates false failures from irrelevant checks.
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Higher-quality models — We use more expensive models for evaluation because accuracy matters more than margins. Cheaper platforms use cheaper models and get inconsistent results.
Methodology: Human agreement rate measured by Hamming's internal evaluation study (2025) comparing LLM-generated scores against human expert annotations across 200+ voice agent call evaluations.
Enterprise-Ready Security
Fortune 500 companies and healthcare enterprises trust Hamming because we've solved enterprise security from day one:
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Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) — Separate testing access from production monitoring. Give contractors access to testing only, while keeping PHI data restricted to authorized personnel.
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SSO Integration — Native Okta support with user management and access reviews built in.
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Audit Logs — Every action tracked and exportable via webhooks. Know exactly who did what, when.
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BAA Available — We work with healthcare companies handling PHI. Our infrastructure is designed for HIPAA compliance.
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Data Residency — US-only by default. EU clusters available for GDPR compliance. Single-tenant deployment for maximum isolation.
Scales With Your Team
Whether you're a startup shipping 5 agents per week or an enterprise with multiple business units, Hamming grows with you:
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50-100+ parallel test calls — Run regression suites in minutes, not hours.
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CI/CD integration — Trigger tests on every deploy. Catch regressions before they reach production.
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Multi-workspace support — Separate environments for dev, staging, and production. Different teams get different access levels.
What Makes Hamming Different
Voice Observability, Not Just Testing
Testing tells you if something is broken. Observability tells you why—and helps you catch issues before users do.
Hamming provides:
- Drill down into failure cases with synchronized audio and transcripts
- Stage-by-stage performance visualization with heatmaps for fast debugging
- Real-time call health tracking with SIP status monitoring and clear termination indicators
- Event correlation by timestamps to pinpoint where latency or errors originate
- Infrastructure metrics — P45, P90, P99 latency per stage, interruption counts, time to first word
Real Production Conditions
Your agents will face degraded audio, network jitter, background noise, and adversarial users. We test against the same conditions:
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Accent simulation — Test with Indian, British, Australian, and other English accents. Plus accents for Spanish, Mandarin, and 20+ languages.
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Background noise injection — Preview and add realistic noise: restaurants, streets, offices, construction sites.
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Barge-in testing — Deterministically test how your agent handles interruptions with configurable timing and keywords.
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Jailbreak detection — We test for prompt injection and security vulnerabilities. And in production, we flag when users attempt to manipulate your agent.
A Fast-Moving Team in Voice AI
When you report a bug or request a feature, our SLA is:
- Most issues and requests resolved within 24 hours
- Complex requests ship in about 1 week
This isn't marketing, it's how we've stayed ahead in a market where everyone is racing to build voice AI infrastructure.
Who Hamming Is Built For
High-Growth Startups
You're shipping fast and can't afford to slow down for manual testing. You need:
- Automated regression testing that runs on every deploy
- Quick onboarding—run your first test in under 10 minutes
- Pricing that scales with your usage, not arbitrary seat counts
- A team that ships features as fast as you do
Enterprise Teams
You have compliance requirements, multiple stakeholders, and can't afford production failures. You need:
- Security controls that satisfy your CISO
- Audit trails for compliance reporting
- Dedicated support with weekly check-ins
- Single-tenant options for maximum data isolation
Healthcare & Regulated Industries
Patient data, PCI compliance, and regulatory requirements aren't optional. You need:
- BAA agreements and HIPAA-compliant infrastructure
- PHI/PII redaction options in transcripts
- US-only data residency (or EU for GDPR)
- Role-based access to separate PHI data from testing data
From Testing to Production Monitoring
Hamming isn't just for pre-deployment testing. The same assertions and evaluation logic work for production calls:
- Monitor real patient/customer calls without changing your evaluation criteria
- Detect production drift before it becomes a support ticket
- Flag malicious users attempting to jailbreak or manipulate your agent
- Track performance over time with annotations for deployments and prompt changes
Your testing investment compounds when the same infrastructure monitors production.
How Teams Actually Use Hamming
Week 1: Import your agent (VAPI, LiveKit, Retell, or custom). Auto-generate test cases and assertions from your prompt. Run your first regression suite.
Week 2-4: Refine assertions based on your specific requirements. Add edge cases for accent handling, interruptions, and tool calls. Integrate with CI/CD.
Ongoing: Every deploy triggers a test run. Failures block production. Production calls are monitored for drift. Weekly performance reports track improvements over time.
Get Started
Stop manually testing your voice agents. Stop wondering if your agent is production-ready.
Start your free trial → Run your first test in under 10 minutes. No credit card required.
Or schedule a demo to see how Hamming works with your specific tech stack and requirements.
