LeadEngine AI — AI Voice Agent for Sales Outreach

AI pipeline that imports leads, auto-calls them via Amazon Nova Sonic voice agent, and tracks outcomes — built for freelancers.

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Inspiration

As a freelance web developer, finding and reaching out to potential clients is the most time-consuming part of the job. I wanted to build a system that does it automatically — find businesses that need websites, call them with an AI voice agent, and track everything without any manual work.

What it does

LeadEngine AI is a fully automated sales pipeline built for freelancers and small agencies. It has three agents:

AGENT 0 — Lead Importer: Accepts Apollo.io CSV exports via webhook, parses all fields, and writes qualified leads to Google Sheets with status CALL_READY.

AGENT 1 — Call Orchestrator: Runs on a schedule (10AM & 2PM daily) or triggered manually from the dashboard. Reads leads from the sheet and initiates outbound calls via Twilio, bridged to Amazon Nova Sonic for the AI conversation.

AGENT 2 — TwiML & Status Handler: Serves TwiML to Twilio connecting call audio to Nova Sonic's WebSocket, then receives post-call status and updates the sheet with outcome and duration.

A full call center dashboard provides live call view, real-time transcript, outcome buttons, lead filtering, and manual call triggering.

How we built it

  • Amazon Nova Sonic as the conversational voice AI agent
  • n8n (self-hosted on Railway) for workflow orchestration
  • Twilio Programmable Voice for outbound dialing and audio bridging
  • Google Sheets as the lead database
  • Apollo.io for lead sourcing via free CSV export

Challenges we ran into

The biggest blocker was AWS account verification. Nova Sonic runs on Amazon Bedrock, which requires a verified AWS billing account. Our account was flagged for verification during the hackathon and is currently pending AWS Support review — this prevented live end-to-end testing of the Nova Sonic voice layer.

Nova Sonic also requires a persistent bidirectional WebSocket server to bridge Twilio audio to Bedrock — it cannot be called directly from a no-code platform like n8n. This required deploying a separate Node.js server alongside the workflows. The architecture is fully designed and the code is complete, but live testing was blocked by the AWS verification issue.

The current demo shows the complete pipeline with a placeholder TwiML voice message standing in for Nova Sonic. The integration code is in the repository and will work immediately once AWS verification clears.

Accomplishments we're proud of

Built a complete, production-ready agentic pipeline in under 4 days — lead import, AI orchestration, Twilio integration, call status tracking, and a full dashboard UI — all on a $0 budget using free tiers only.

What we learned

  • Nova Sonic requires a WebSocket bridge server, not a simple REST API call
  • n8n self-hosted on Railway has different webhook URL patterns than the cloud version
  • Twilio free trial requires verified caller IDs before dialing international numbers

What's next

  • Complete Nova Sonic integration once AWS verification clears
  • Post-call email follow-up via SendGrid
  • Expand lead sourcing beyond Apollo CSV exports
  • Package as a SaaS tool for other freelancers ```

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