Europe End to End, and a Canadian Voice Engine

A year ago, "where does my data live" was a question we could answer for storage and not much else. Today we can answer it for the call itself, leg by leg, and for a European workspace the answer is Europe: the room, the speech recognition, the model, the voice, the transcript, and the equipment that connects the call to the telephone network.

Here is what shipped.

Your calls now run in Europe

A European workspace already kept its records in Frankfurt: contacts, call records, transcripts and messages. Now the call itself lives there too.

• The room. A call made or received in the browser is switched by our own media servers in Frankfurt.
• The conversation. Speech recognition, the language model (europe-west4) and speech synthesis all run at European endpoints, and the AI agent that holds the conversation runs in Frankfurt.
• The phone network. An outbound call is originated from our own equipment in Frankfurt and handed to the carrier in Europe.
• What the call leaves behind. The transcript and the AI summary are written to the workspace database in Frankfurt. There is no audio recording to store: the platform transcribes and summarises the live call and keeps neither a carrier recording nor an archived copy of the audio.

And since August 28 we hold our first European telephone number, in Estonia. A call to it is delivered by the carrier in Ireland to our own equipment in Frankfurt and answered there by the European agent. On a call we placed to it from a Toronto mobile, the agent was on the line about two seconds after pickup. It was the last leg we could not demonstrate, and now we can.

European numbers, starting with Estonia

European numbers carry registration requirements that vary by country, and we did the paperwork first. We hold approved registrations of our own in Estonia and the United Kingdom, with more countries in progress, and a European workspace can take an Estonian number today against the registration we already hold: pick the number, no documents.

For other countries, the dashboard now has a registrations flow: choose a country, see exactly what its regulator asks for, upload the documents, and track the review. The number follows the approval.

The maximum we can do for Canada, today

Canada is a different shape, and we would rather describe it precisely than round up. A Canadian workspace's records are stored in Montreal, and since August 19 the audio of a call made or received in the browser is processed in Montreal too.

New this week: an optional Canadian voice engine. When a Canadian workspace selects it, all three legs of the AI conversation run in Montreal: speech recognition on Amazon Transcribe (ca-central-1), the language model on Vertex AI (northamerica-northeast1), and speech synthesis on Amazon Polly (ca-central-1). It also brings the first Canadian French voices our platform has offered, so a Quebec business can be answered in fr-CA by an engine that runs in its own province.

It is off by default and chosen per workspace. And for now it moves the AI conversation, not the telephone network: we are working on pairing it with the same in-region call handling we built for Europe, so that a Canadian workspace's calls can avoid the United States completely.

A harder account to break into

Residency answers where your data sits. The other half of that question is who can reach it, and we hardened the account this week. Two-step verification is available on every account: turn it on from Settings with any authenticator app, confirm one code, and keep the ten recovery codes you are given. Once it is on, we ask for a code on a new device and again every 30 days. An account that signs in with Google or Microsoft relies on the second factor the provider already asked for; you can add ours as well.

And the calls themselves: calls and meetings made in the app are now end-to-end encrypted between your device and the AI, under a per-room key our media servers never hold, so what they relay is ciphertext they cannot read.

Priced in your currency

Billing now follows your billing address. A Canadian address is billed in Canadian dollars and an address in the European Union in Euros, and every price is set in its own currency rather than converted from US dollars at the day's rate, so the number you see at checkout is the number on every invoice after it. District AI Voice Solo is CA$59 or €35 a month, Voice Starter CA$119 or €69, Voice Pro CA$359 or €219, and Voice Studio CA$1,299 or €799, with overage minutes priced the same way in your currency. And you no longer need an invitation to begin: create an account, choose a plan, and your workspace is created as soon as the payment clears.

Why the map is generated, not written

Most residency pages are written by marketing and audited by nobody. Ours is generated from the same registry that routes live calls, and every claim on it is pinned by tests that fail our build when the copy and the wiring disagree.

The same rule applies below the copy. Every fifteen minutes an automated check asks each of our signalling buses whether the trunks that actually carry your calls are still registered, because a control plane can be empty while every server in front of it reports perfect health. We would rather find that ourselves than have you find it.

If you run several businesses across regions, this is the same discipline that keeps workspaces separate: the boundary is enforced by the system, not by a promise.

The full map, per region and per data type, is at distronode.com/sovereign/data-residency. When the map changes, the page changes the same day, and the changelog says so.