When a carrier answers, Cooks streams the callee's audio back and runs it through voice-activity detection and a few rules. "Hello?" followed by silence is a person. "You've reached", a beep or a long unbroken speech is a machine. If that is unclear, a small model decides within a few hundred milliseconds.

Twilio's answering-machine detection runs at the same time as a fallback. The first verdict on a line wins and the other is ignored.

Measured against the mock carrier in the repo. Timing depends on the recognizer you configure: OpenAI Realtime, a local Nemotron model through sherpa-onnx, or none.

The MCP server is a thin client over the REST API. Run it on a laptop against a hosted Cooks, or next to the API for the team. In this setup Cooks itself spends no tokens.

Cooks can also run its own agents for drafts, reply classification and research. Add a key for the model provider you use, or point it at a local model, and each run is logged with its tokens and cost.

An example session. The assistant calls Cooks tools; Cooks applies the workspace rules and records every action.

claude mcp add cooks
-e COOKS_API_URL=http://localhost:8080
-e COOKS_API_KEY=cooks-api-...
-- npx -y https://github.com/walter-grace/cooks/releases/latest/download/cooks-mcp.tgz

Create the key under Settings, then API keys. The tarball on GitHub Releases is the distribution; nothing is published to npm.

{ "mcpServers": { "cooks": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "https://github.com/walter-grace/cooks/releases/latest/download/cooks-mcp.tgz"], "env": { "COOKS_API_URL": "http://localhost:8080", "COOKS_API_KEY": "cooks-api-..." } } } }

Paste into claude_desktop_config.json or .cursor/mcp.json. Windsurf and Codex take the same shape.

pnpm --filter cooks-mcp dev # hosts https://your-host/mcp

grok.com/connectors → New connector → Custom

URL https://your-host/mcp

then sign in when Grok asks

Grok runs the OAuth sign-in in a pop-up, so each person signs in with their own account and approves scopes. The host has to be reachable from the public internet.

claude mcp add --transport http cooks https://your-host/mcp

or paste https://your-host/mcp as a claude.ai connector

No key to share. The client gets a 401 with OAuth discovery, registers itself, and each person signs in and approves scopes for one workspace. Tokens carry their role, so a rep cannot delete a sequence they do not own.

Gmail, Microsoft 365 or SMTP, with inbound sync for replies and bounces.

An email address, an SMS number and an iMessage line per rep, with one inbox and STOP honored.

Contact and company sync, auto-enroll from a list or deal stage, calls and email on the timeline.

A Speko agent places the call from a script and brings back the outcome, transcript and recording.

Same paths, envelopes and paging as the commercial API it mirrors. Existing clients change one base URL.

Signed, retried events for calls, emails, enrollments, tasks and prospects.

API keys, OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, or Clerk SSO. Secrets are encrypted at rest with a key you hold.

Tasks, prospects, sequences, emails, calls, dialer, practice, signals and settings.

Nooks and Orum charge per seat and quote prices on a sales call. Cooks is MIT licensed, so the recurring costs are telephony and your server.

Nooks, Orum and Twilio facts read from their pricing pages in October 2026, linked in the footer. Check them before you buy; they change.

Buyers report $65 to $150 per user per month (Vendr, February 2026). The list quote is said to run higher.

Buyers report $100 to $200 per user per month (Vendr, February 2026), and nine seats is the floor.

100,000 outbound minutes cost about $1,400 at Twilio's rate, ten numbers $138, plus whatever your server costs.

You need Node 22, pnpm 9 and Postgres 15 or newer. Jobs, rate limits, the webhook outbox and MCP sessions live in that database, so there is nothing else to operate. Bootstrap prints a workspace API key once, and the web app is served at /app.

Docker Compose starts Postgres, the API, the worker, the MCP server and Mailpit together. Production notes, Twilio setup and the mock carrier for trying the dialer without an account are in the self-hosting guide.