[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) - Testing and Observabili...
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Launch HN: Vocera (YC F24) - Testing and Observability for Voice AI
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!
Author : Sid45
Score : 46 points
Date : 2024-12-03 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| technics256 wrote:
| This is the first thing I thought too, the name confused me
| with the company and brand Vocera, I thought it was from them.
| Sid45 wrote:
| Feedback taken. Thanks for your input. Definitely we will
| evaluate this
| Sid45 wrote:
| 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
| brandall10 wrote:
| It's prominently displayed as the top result when googling
| "Vocera". Unsure how this was missed by the founders or
| anyone involved in the YC network.
| Sid45 wrote:
| It's a valid critique. In hindsight, this should have been
| caught earlier.
| tabarnacle wrote:
| 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.
| Sid45 wrote:
| 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.
| tabarnacle wrote:
| Ahh ok, understood. Thank you.
| savy91 wrote:
| Is there any way to sign up and try this without going through
| the sales call/demo?
| Sid45 wrote:
| Our onboarding currently includes a quick demo to ensure users
| get the most value out of the tool and understand its
| capabilities in detail.
|
| Having said that we have a role play which you can try. In
| roleplay, you talk with our AI and then we evaluate your
| performance.
| Areibman wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Given the size of the niche (developers building voice agents),
| do you find there's a lot of demand for testing and
| observability? From my anecdata, many of the voice AI agent
| builders are using SDKs and builder tools (Voiceflow, Vapi,
| Bland, Vocode, etc). Observability is usually already baked-in
| pattern with these SDKs (testing I'm not so sure of).
|
| One conversation I had with a voice agent builder: "Our product
| is complex enough where external testing tools don't make sense.
| And we know when things are not working because we have close
| relationships with power users and companies." Whose problem are
| you solving?
|
| Your tool looks very powerful, but might the broader opportunity
| be just to use your evals to roll out the best voice agents
| yourself?
| Sid45 wrote:
| Great question! We've seen significant demand for testing and
| observability across sectors like healthcare, insurance, home
| services, and e-commerce. You're correct--many of our customers
| also rely on tools like Voiceflow, Vapi, and others to build
| their agents.
|
| What they love about our platform is having both testing and
| observability in one place. Observability helps identify issues
| while testing allows them to simulate and prevent those
| problems before they escalate. This dual approach is especially
| helpful for teams dealing with voice-specific challenges,
| industry-specific nuances, or company-specific edge cases.
|
| Our tool is particularly valuable for teams stuck with manual
| testing--it saves time in iterating the bot and ensure the edge
| cases are taken care of
| filipeisho wrote:
| This is super dope! Are you looking to hire? Your product made me
| super excited.
| Sid45 wrote:
| Thanks a lot.
|
| Yes, we will be hiring for founding engineers pretty soon.
| Please reach out to founders@vocera.ai if you are interested
| rahulgoel wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. For a sec, I thought this was related to
| the healthcare comms firm owned by Stryker.
|
| https://www.stryker.com/us/en/portfolios/medical-surgical-eq...
| Sid45 wrote:
| yeah, we are Vocera AI.
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