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

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131–140 of 182 posts

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

#131

Wow this is incredible. I've worked a bit in the conversational LLM space and one of the hardest problems we were struggling with was human interruption handling. From the demo it seems like you guys have it down. Can't wait to see where this goes :) BTW I don't think the demo works on mobile, tried it on safari on IOS and got no response.

They're most likely have two "agents" working in tandem to listen and speak, and it seems like the listener takes precedence over the speaker agent but underneath they share the same context window. Programming wise, probably using multithreading and channels architecture, depending on the programming language.

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

#132

Awesome product. We would love to use this for our app, but it wouldn't make sense economically. At $0.10 per minute it would cost significantly more than our existing TTS and SST solution. We've manually added a VAD and will have to add a way of handling interruption. All-in-all it roughly costs us $0.01 per minute and we just can't afford a 10X increase in costs. Guessing you guys have found a use case with higher…

Thanks. We get it—the current pricing doesn't fit everyone's budget. We will try to look into ways to roll out a more affordable option later.

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

#133
post #115

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

But we don't handle interruptions yet, that's some cool stuff @yanyan_evie!

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

#134

Commercially, I struggle to see how this fits in to the most natural application, a contact center. For example, take Amazon Connect pricing: There is an Amazon Connect service usage charge, based on end-customer call duration. At $0.018 per minute * 7 minutes = $0.126 There is an inbound call per minute charge for German DID numbers. At $0.0040 per minute * 7 minutes = $0.0280 If I were to bring retell into the loop…

Thanks for the heads-up. We're definitely aiming to cover customer service down the line. We'll be exploring ways to introduce a more affordable option soon.

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

#139
post #60

I would feel deceived if I were a customer of any company or office that uses this. If I take the trouble to call by phone, it's because I want to speak with a person. If I wanted to talk to a machine, I would send an email, talk to a chatbot, or even try to communicate with the company through social media. Calling by phone implies that I am investing time and effort, and I expect the same from the other side.

I much rather talk to an AI bot than waiting on the line for a human for 50 minutes.
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