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Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

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Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

#1
Hey HN, we’re Shashij, Sidhant, and Tarush, founders of Vocera AI (https://www.vocera.ai) – a platform that automates the testing and monitoring of AI voice agents. We’re building the product we wish we had when we were developing voice agents. Here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRtAb_E60jY. You can engage in a roleplay as well which we made just for fun: https://www.vocera.ai/talk.

We were working on voice agents in healthcare, and kept running into the same problem: manually testing was incredibly time-consuming and error-prone. Testing voice AI in a comprehensive way was far more difficult than we had anticipated – not just the setup, but the ongoing monitoring of production calls. Despite our best efforts, some calls still failed once we went live.

The main challenges we faced were: (1) Demonstrating reliability to customers for production was really tough; (2) Manual testing was incomplete and didn't cover edge cases; (3) We couldn’t easily simulate all possible conversations, especially with diverse customer personas; (4) Monitoring every production call manually was a huge time sink.

We built Vocera to solve these problems. Vocera automatically simulates real personas, generates a wide range of testing scenarios from your prompts/call scripts and monitors all production calls. The result? You can be sure your voice agents are reliable, and you get real-time insights into how they’re performing.

Our platform tests how your AI responds to diverse personas, evaluates the conversation against different metrics and gives you directed feedback on the issues.

What’s different about us is that we don’t just automate the evaluation. We generate scenarios and metrics automatically, so developers do not have to spend time defining their scenarios or eval metrics. This saves them a ton of time. Obviously, we give them the option to define these manually as well. Also, we provide detailed analytics on the agent's performance across simulations so developers do not need to listen to all call recordings manually.

If you’re building voice agents and want to ensure they’re reliable and production-ready, or if you’re just interested in the challenges of Voice AI, we’d love to chat.

We’d love to get your feedback, thoughts, or experiences related to testing voice agents!

Re: Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

#2
> We were working on voice agents in healthcare

Having some experience with the healthcare industry, seeing the name Vocera here is incredibly confusing.

Vocera is a very common communication platform and set of devices used in hospitals: https://vocera.stryker.com/s/product-hub/vocera-smartbadge These things are everywhere in healthcare already. If someone came to me and suggested using “Vocera” for a healthcare related tech thing, my mind would assume it’s the Stryker product. It’s that common.

So unfortunately I’d recommend a name change as a high priority. Dealing with healthcare tech is difficult enough, but using the same name as a very popular and established healthcare tech product is going to be an unnecessary obstacle in getting traction. Not to mention that Stryker’s Vocera division will have some things to say about this.

Re: Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

#4
post #2

> We were working on voice agents in healthcare Having some experience with the healthcare industry, seeing the name Vocera here is incredibly confusing. Vocera is a very common communication platform and set of devices used in hospitals: https://vocera.stryker.com/s/product-hub/vocera-smartbadge These things are everywhere in healthcare already. If someone came to me and suggested using “Vocera” for a healthcare rel…

This is the first thing I thought too, the name confused me with the company and brand Vocera, I thought it was from them.

Re: Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

#5
post #2

> We were working on voice agents in healthcare Having some experience with the healthcare industry, seeing the name Vocera here is incredibly confusing. Vocera is a very common communication platform and set of devices used in hospitals: https://vocera.stryker.com/s/product-hub/vocera-smartbadge These things are everywhere in healthcare already. If someone came to me and suggested using “Vocera” for a healthcare rel…

You are right. We were unaware of Stryker's Vocera prominence when we chose the name. Healthcare voice agents are a huge space. We have 6 clients in healthcare already.

We will discuss and evaluate the name internally to avoid confusion or potential issues. Thanks a lot for your feedback

Re: Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

#6
post #2

> We were working on voice agents in healthcare Having some experience with the healthcare industry, seeing the name Vocera here is incredibly confusing. Vocera is a very common communication platform and set of devices used in hospitals: https://vocera.stryker.com/s/product-hub/vocera-smartbadge These things are everywhere in healthcare already. If someone came to me and suggested using “Vocera” for a healthcare rel…

This is the first thing I thought too, the name confused me with the company and brand Vocera, I thought it was from them.

Feedback taken. Thanks for your input. Definitely we will evaluate this

Re: Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

#7
post #5
post #2

> We were working on voice agents in healthcare Having some experience with the healthcare industry, seeing the name Vocera here is incredibly confusing. Vocera is a very common communication platform and set of devices used in hospitals: https://vocera.stryker.com/s/product-hub/vocera-smartbadge These things are everywhere in healthcare already. If someone came to me and suggested using “Vocera” for a healthcare rel…

You are right. We were unaware of Stryker's Vocera prominence when we chose the name. Healthcare voice agents are a huge space. We have 6 clients in healthcare already. We will discuss and evaluate the name internally to avoid confusion or potential issues. Thanks a lot for your feedback

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

#8

I was able to easily flip the script on the return scenario to convince the rep that they were the one calling me to return - and then flipped it again. The quality of the voice was great, though.

Thats great. We also generate adversarial scenarios for our customer's voice agents like you did. The roleplay example was made for you to get a sample evaluation of your performance. In reality, we generate simulations automatically and provide analytics on your AI agent's performance, as demonstrated in the demo video.

Glad you liked the voice quality.

Re: Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) – Testing and Observability for Voice AI

#10
post #8

I was able to easily flip the script on the return scenario to convince the rep that they were the one calling me to return - and then flipped it again. The quality of the voice was great, though.

Thats great. We also generate adversarial scenarios for our customer's voice agents like you did. The roleplay example was made for you to get a sample evaluation of your performance. In reality, we generate simulations automatically and provide analytics on your AI agent's performance, as demonstrated in the demo video. Glad you liked the voice quality.

Ahh ok, understood. Thank you.
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