Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 182 posts

Re: Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

#111

Post by Systemling0815 »

yanyan_evie wrote: post #107
nsokolsky wrote: post #101

The demo is nice but it makes me wonder: why would a company have a fully automated voice line rather than a booking interface? As a customer I'm never happy to call a company to make a reservation. I'd be extra annoyed if an AI picked up and I had to go through the motions of a conversation instead of doing two clicks in a Web UI.

Yes, for booking appointments, a simple interface might do the trick. However, we've seen many excellent use cases of our API that prevent repetitive tasks and help companies save money, like AI logistics assistants, pre-surgery data collection, AI tutor and AI therapists. I believe the future will bring even more voice interface applications. Imagine not having to navigate complex UIs; you could easily book a flight…

[dead]

Re: Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

#114

Post by omeze »

the actual conversational flow is awesome. 800ms is only a little worse than internet audio latency (commonly 300-500ms on services like Discord or even in-game audio for things like Valorant)! Also cool that you can bring your own LLM and audio provider. awesome product!

Re: Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

#115

Post by russ »

jamesmcintyre wrote: post #41

Until this demo the most impressive conversational experiences I've seen were Pi and Livekit's Kitt demo ( https://livekit.io/kitt ). I do not think kitt was quite as fast in response time (as retell) but incredibly impressive for being fully opensource and open to any choice of api's (imagine kitt with groq api + deepgram's aura for super low latency). Retell focusing on all of the other weird/unpredictable aspects…

We recently made it a lot easier to build your own KITT too: https://github.com/livekit/agents

Re: Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

#116

Post by AustinZzx »

omeze wrote: post #114

the actual conversational flow is awesome. 800ms is only a little worse than internet audio latency (commonly 300-500ms on services like Discord or even in-game audio for things like Valorant)! Also cool that you can bring your own LLM and audio provider. awesome product!

Thank you for the support!

Re: Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

#117

Post by AustinZzx »

samstave wrote: post #72
AustinZzx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. Currently, our product does not contain LLM, as we are purely voice API -- instead the developer is bringing in their own LLM solutions and gets to decide what to say. This would be a great guardrail to build in for all sorts of reasons, will see how we can suggest our users adopt it.

May I please understand your arch; a dev builds an app it | to your API and you spit it back out? - if so - ensure when you spit out whatever it defines itself to whomever is listening.... -- Plz explain the arch of how your system works? (or link me if I missed..) ---- Shortest and most importnat law ever written: "an AI must identify itself as AI when asked by Humans." 0. Law of robotics. ------ @autsin - Cool - so…

Nice catch on the working -- customer is indeed more accurate than user.

For outage handling: we strive to keep up 99.9 plus up time, and in the case of a dropped call, the agent would hang up if using phone, and might have different error handling in web depending on how customer handles it.

Re: Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

#118

Post by yanyan_evie »

omeze wrote: post #114

the actual conversational flow is awesome. 800ms is only a little worse than internet audio latency (commonly 300-500ms on services like Discord or even in-game audio for things like Valorant)! Also cool that you can bring your own LLM and audio provider. awesome product!

Glad you're into the "bring your own LLM" feature—it's tough to fine-tune an LLM, but it's definitely worth it for the improved results.

Re: Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

#119

Post by yanyan_evie »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #103
AustinZzx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate a bit on "my speech engine tied to a specific model provider"? Sorry, I might be lacking some context on what you are referring to here.

I will be in the market for a text-to-speech engine, but from looking at the website it seems the model of Retell is trying to push is "use our all in one model + text to speech service" which is problematic when my choice of model and control over how that model runs is at the core of my product, and text to speech is a "nice to have" feature. I want an endpoint that I can fire off text to in a streaming mode, where…

If you are looking for a text to speech solution, you could use elevenlabs turbo model.

Re: Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM

#120

Post by AustinZzx »

esafak wrote: post #109
AustinZzx wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We strive to make conversation humanlike, so maybe less contact center ops development, but more focus on performance and customizability of voice interactions. As a startup, our edge over big tech is being nimble and executing fast.

I would keep working on positioning; I feel that your language is woolly at times: > we focus most of our energy on innovating the AI conversation experience, making it more magical day by day. We pride ourselves on wowing our customers when they experience our product themselves. This is not useful; you already have testimonials to show what customers think. Maybe convert that first FAQ point about differentiation i…

Good point, note token. benchmarking is a great tool to show differentiation. BTW, apart from what we think is important ourselves (latency, mean opinion score, etc), would you mind sharing what you want to see in such a benchmark? One key metric I like to keep an eye on is the end conversion rate of using the product, but that's very use-case specific.
Post reply on HN