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

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141–150 of 182 posts

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

#141

I forgot that we're playing the demo games now. Well I'll see your demo, and raise you another demo https://x.com/sean_moriarity/status/1760435005119934862 Except that demo was done by a single person, with a day job and no cap table.

Love to see people has interest over our demo. But, I checked his former post, and he already built a voice Agent a couple of days ago. So I believe he just changed the prompts to create this demo: https://twitter.com/sean_moriarity/status/175895035375034804.... Also, after testing their live demo at https://nero.ngrok.dev/, it appears it might still be missing some key features, such as latency and endpoint detection.

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

#142
post #8

I was skeptical but the demo is incredible ( https://beta.retellai.com/home-agent )

Incredible, even has a bit of "human-like" passive-aggression when I was asking dumb questions:

    [Me] what kind of dental equipment do you use?
    [AI] (sigh) we use a variety of reputable brands for our dental equipment, was there anything specific you'd like to know?
It almost sounded like she was rolling her eyes at that question, like I was wasting her time haha

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

#143
post #82

This is very interesting. One thing I wondered about the per-minute pricing is how to keep a phone agent like this from being kept on the phone in order to run up a bill for a company using it. It'd be very inexpensive to make many automated calls to an AI bot like the dentist receptionist in the demo, and to just play a recording of someone asking questions designed to keep the bot on the phone. As a customer of a s…

What stops it for regular human-operated phone lines?

humans can hang up

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

#145

Can you buy/remove phone numbers programmatically? I can't find anything in the docs.

We have an open-source demo repo: Node.js demo: https://github.com/adam-team/retell-backend-node-demo

Python demo: https://github.com/adam-team/python-backend-demo

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

#147
post #102

Sad that people think working on crypto is a waste of time yet here we are making antiquated contact methodologies even harder to prune out.

Hey think about the bright side of voice AI -- there are new opportunities like AI companions, AI assistant, not only the antiquated contact methodologies.

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

#149

Just tried the dental appointment example. Voice sounds great! But I found two issues with sharing: - I told it I wasn't available until next year. We confirmed a date. It said Feb 4th, next year. I asked it when next year was and it gave me the definition. On further prying, it told me the current year was 2022, so next year was 2023. For a scheduling use case, it should be date/availability/time zone aware. - At th…

I had a similar experience when it offered to connect me to the office manager so I could remove PII from the system, where it just stated it was taking an action and went idle.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an AI therapy session oh no

The use case I recall involves a nonprofit organization focused on preventing suicide. They are hoping for an AI therapy solution capable of listening to patients and picking up the phone when no human is available. This isn't entirely unacceptable because one of the therapist's roles is to listen to problems, so AI can effectively substitute in this aspect.

If it was only to gap fill then that sounds reasonable, but other risks here is the voice agent picks up slack and lowers the pressure for staffing and working on solving these problems in the first place.

What is worse, that no one is available to listen to you when you're suicidal, or that you lack so much value that only a machine would talk to you. I'm sure some people would have an extremely poor reaction to that.

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