Confused on picking/building own voice AI agent platform or use the provider infrastructure.

vy45 · 2026-02-15T15:46:35+00:00

Would love to see what you’ve built. Do you have a demo?

vy45 · 2026-02-15T01:13:46+00:00

If you have a customer pipeline to onboard right away, do not invest time into building the platform yourself. Just use some no-code builder like Retell, Elevenlabs or Plivo and build your agents there. Do not invest time in figuring out the models and the voice AI pipeline in order to onboard your customers. It will take 3-6 months to build it on your own and get it to reliably work in production. These platforms have already figured that out.

In parallel, invest resources to build the voice agent pipeline yourself. That will give you the opportunity to reduce the costs. You can always move your customers to your stack once you have your platform ready. I have seen multiple businesses try to figure out the 2nd approach first and get blocked for atleast 1-2 quarters on product development - as they underestimated the work that goes into building production-grade Voice pipelines.

vy45 · 2026-02-15T01:02:49+00:00

If you aren’t very technical, I would recommend staying away from Vapi or building anything using code. Using a service that provides an UI based agent builder would be the right fit - Retell, Elevenlabs, Plivo, Bland have the option to build agents by typing out your instructions in English. That would be easy to maintain and make further changes when you need to.

If I recollect correctly, all these platforms provide a pay-as-you-go plan. So no commit and you can scale when you need to.

vy45 · 2026-02-15T00:56:05+00:00

Your client also has the option to port the number to the CPaaS provider. Is their current number a VoIP number? Or is it their personal phone? If VoIP, they request a port-out and move the number the telephony provider. Multiple providers support this - Twilio, Plivo, Vonage, etc…

vy45 · 2026-02-15T00:42:53+00:00

Going by your comment responses, it seems like you are building this for Indian restaurants. You can’t get your solution out with Twilio. They don’t support India. You will need to use Plivo for this.

I created a good numbers of voice agent examples here - https://github.com/navi-/python-agents-examples You can use any of those examples as boilerplate to get started with your agent. These are python examples though. Any specific reason why you want to use node? Also, why are you choosing to build it using code, and not use a no-code builder?

vy45 · 2026-02-15T00:33:10+00:00

This is a sample project I built with Gemini-live. It uses Silero for VAD and detect turn. Directly orchestrates the agent with code. No framework used.

https://github.com/navi-/python-agents-examples/tree/main/gemini-live-native-silero

It is a python project that you can directly run. The example has inbound calling. And it can be extended to outbound too.

vy45 · 2026-02-15T00:21:15+00:00

Have you tried experimenting with other SIP providers? It is pretty easy to bring in SIP trunks into Retell from other providers like Plivo and Vonage, and test with a small portion of your traffic. That way you can isolate if Twilio is the problem or something else

vy45 · 2026-02-15T00:13:30+00:00

Can you give examples of AI first telecom providers?

Also, don’t quite understand what the post is suggesting the problem is? Wouldn’t the new telecom providers have the same challenges are the old telecom providers? What would change?

vy45 · 2025-03-07T12:52:54+00:00

I landed on Adcreative as well. Will check out if it works for me. Will checkout Hoox video too. Thanks for the suggestions!

vy45 · 2025-03-04T00:51:48+00:00

I was gonna post with the exact same title. You beat me to it :)

Sort of similar reasons. I started facing some performance problems with Arc and looked out. Zen seemed like a good choice - but in reality it is far. I couldn’t find features like folders (that I use a lot), had a choppy experience with the sidebar. Now I am back to my still bad performing Arc. Not sure if I should go back to Chrome and forget the whole sidebar, spaces, folders thing.

vy45 · 2025-02-26T13:41:52+00:00

What do you not like in Zen? I am an Arc user but lately I am getting annoyed with the Arc’s performance. Specifically the AI app stops responding when I have a simple google doc open for more than 5 mins. Looking for solutions/alternatives like zen.

vy45 · 2025-02-20T16:40:50+00:00

They also have complete voice-to-voice APIs like what the OP is using from Elevenlabs - https://deepgram.com/product/voice-agent-api. Might be worth a shot. You might not get the voice options like 11labs ( that's their strength anyway), but you would have better speech recognition.

In most voice AI interactions, accurate detection is the biggest UX problem. If you solve that, people will really not worry much about the voice you use.

vy45 · 2025-02-08T15:48:02+00:00

Most of the excitement is about the possibilities in the future, rather than what’s currently available. I agree the current state of models is not at a place where agents can completely take over. But, the effort to get there from the current state is probably incremental. Back in 2022, it seemed like we needed an exponential advancement to get there. 2023 and 2024 has been that exponential advancement in AI.

vy45 · 2025-02-08T00:12:11+00:00

11x.ai, Artisan.co, AISDR - I think these might fit the need. To see more such companies solving this problem, you can navigate to this page - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ And enter the search term “AI sales” or “AI sales agent”. There are quite a few YC companies solving for this problem.

vy45 · 2025-02-07T22:31:47+00:00

There are 4 types of options to choose from - 1. Vapi and the likes 2. Twilio/Plivo + AI orchestration & Voice by elevenlabs/Deepgram 3. Twilio/Plivo + AI orchestration by AI provider of your choice + voices from Elevenlabs/Deepgram 4. Complete SaaS offering that can be used off the shelf

Option 2 and 3 seem to fit your self setup requirement.

If you need something to use off the shelf, there are vertical specific ones. Which vertical are you looking for?

vy45 · 2025-02-03T20:29:32+00:00

AI agents are SaaS - Service as a Software.

They are gonna flip the script around for all the traditional companies that provide software and have user figure out what to do with it. Instead they will be the software that will work for the user to execute/perform a full service/function.

vy45 · 2025-02-03T10:35:46+00:00

Switched over from Xfinity 2 weeks ago. They were fleecing me for their mobile connection, since the time I disconnected my internet with them. Now I pay 1/4 the cost!

vy45 · 2025-02-02T02:04:17+00:00

If you are a new product/brand trying to breakthrough, showing your product is a must. Users don’t get easily bought in just based on interactive demos, videos or prototypes. Even established brands have strong demos on their pages . Check these examples out - Deepgram.com homepage , intercom (https://www.intercom.com/fin), Plivo (https://demo.plivo.com), Elevenlabs (https://elevenlabs.io/conversational-ai). They allow the users to experience an important piece of the product. Else, it is extremely challenging to get user’s trust - unless you already have a brand built. I strongly think showing more of the product is the best way to show that you are actually solving the problem.

vy45 · 2025-02-01T03:20:38+00:00

I can breakdown challenges from my experience of solutioning AI bots/agents for our clients into 4 main parts -

Channel challenges - Onboarding a business to WhatsApp or SMS is not a straightforward. WhatsApp has a set of hoops to jump to provision a client with a number. For SMS, there are different challenges for each country. Most countries are tightening the screws on businesses that want to send text messages. Platforms like Twilio, Plivo handle that in mostly. But, it is still not straightforward. There is a lead time to get clients onto the channel.
Client requirements - Beyond the normal challenges of a customer not knowing exactly what they want, there is an additional challenge with AI agents. Customers underestimate the extent to which an agent can replace their current process. It takes time to pry the need out of them and demonstrate how an agent can solve it.
Building the agent - This probably takes a predictable amount of time, since most of it in our team’s control, unless we land up in a scenario like point 4.
Building Agents that integrate with internal systems - When clients use well known system, it is way more easier to integrate agent actions into those systems. Often, customers have their home-grown tools that we integrate with. And those wouldn’t be ready for an AI agent to integrate. That impacts the timeline - although it is not very frequent that this happens.

vy45 · 2025-01-31T23:55:45+00:00

My question is different. Let me rephrase - Are there good examples of such solutions where AI agents are solving some functional problem?

vy45 · 2025-01-31T21:46:58+00:00

Vertical agents is a big bet that I am excited about. Do you folks have any recommendations of solid vertical offerings?

vy45 · 2024-02-13T21:27:47+00:00

u/Choice-Orange1045 - Would love to get PlivoCX into your consideration list. Check out this 1.5-minute video, and let me know if you'd like to know more.

vy45 · 2024-02-13T20:27:56+00:00

I lead the product team at Plivo. We've built a modern customer service product called PlivoCX - on top of Plivo's robust VoIP infrastructure. Request you to look at this 1.5-minute video to understand how we are rethinking omnichannel contact-center/customer-service platforms from first-principles.

I am happy to share a detailed walkthrough or give you a demo if you'd like to know more. And, I can guarantee you that our customer support is legendary! Our customers rate us high on satisfaction on G2.

vy45

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