Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 182 posts

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

#61
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.

Totally understandable that most people would want to chat with a human agent (I sometimes share the same feeling). However, I do think that a major reason for that is voice bots were bad before and could not understand and get things done, and felt like waste of time. With advancements in voice AI and LLM, I'm confident that there would be more use cases where talking to a voice bot is not a bad experience.

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

#62
post #59

Can you share what you're doing for TTS? Is it a proprietary fully pretrained in-house model, a fine tuned open source one, or a commercially licensed one?

For TTS, we are currently integrating with different providers like Elevenlabs, Openai TTS, etc. We do have plans down the road to train our own TTS model.

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

#64
post #58

Congratulations! How do you position yourselves against Google Duplex/Dialogflow and other competitors? https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow

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.

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

#66
post #59

Can you share what you're doing for TTS? Is it a proprietary fully pretrained in-house model, a fine tuned open source one, or a commercially licensed one?

For TTS, we are currently integrating with different providers like Elevenlabs, Openai TTS, etc. We do have plans down the road to train our own TTS model.

Ah thank you! What's the lowest latency option you have found so far?

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

#67

With respect to Alignment, it should be a fundamental requirement that an speech AI is ___REQUIRED___ to honestly inform a Human if its speaking to an AI. Can you please ensure, going forward, you have the universal "truth" as it were, to have your system always identify if its AI when "prompted" (irrespective of what app/dev has built - your API should ensure that if "safeword" is used it shall reveal its AI) -- "tr…

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.

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

#69
post #54

This is absolutely wild - I got chills when I thought about the fact I’m talking to a computer. Congratulations on flying straight over uncanny valley.

Thanks for the support, we still have a lot of work ahead of us to make it better!

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

#70
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.

Personally I think if bot can get things done, then I wont mind. I just hope these bot don't repeat same things and don't get something done
Post reply on HN