[HN Gopher] Show HN: Vogent - Better Building Blocks for Voice AI
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Show HN: Vogent - Better Building Blocks for Voice AI
        
       Hi HN! Excited to share some stuff we've been building.  We spent
       the last year building voice agents to automate individual call
       tasks for companies with large call centers. The STT-LLM-TTS-VAD
       cycle is mostly solved at this point, but the last-mile problem for
       making these agents performant was frustrating. We ended up
       building a lot of band-aids, and we decided to put them together
       into their own end-to-end product.  Vogent is a platform for
       building and serving Voice AI agents, with a focus on providing
       higher-level building blocks that make it easy to get a voice agent
       working quickly. You can check out the docs at
       https://docs.vogent.ai  It supports the typical design process of a
       voice agent (choosing/prompting a model, selecting a voice, and
       hosting on a phone number or accessing via API), but it has
       additional pieces that make voice agents performant quickly, like
       (among other things):  - A drag-and-drop agent builder  Under the
       hood, this involves feeding the model only context relevant to the
       goals of the current node (e.g., asking a particular question and
       probing conversationally for the answer), while giving it the
       ability to call a function with the outcome once the goal is
       achieved to transition to the appropriate next node. This makes it
       easy to build voice agents that need the structure of a multi-step
       talk track with the flexibility of accomplishing each task
       conversationally.  - Voices that are trained to spell  Off-the-
       shelf voices (e.g. Eleven, Cartesia) sound _much_ more artificial
       when they spell. It might sound like an edge case, but this killed
       almost every engagement we had. We ended up recruiting Upworkers
       with different accents, having them spell a few thousand phrases,
       and training our own voices by modifying open-source architectures.
       Choose "Carlos" for a spelling-optimized voice right now; we're
       adding a lot more soon.  - An IVR detection model  This detector
       uses the audio stream to predict whether a line came from an IVR or
       a human, and switches between different LLMs based on the result
       (so you can have independent IVR navigation and conversational
       models).  - Model versioning and counterfactuals  Vogent enables
       model versioning and testing against past dials within the product.
       Any feedback would be appreciated. Please also feel free to join
       our Discord: https://discord.gg/JmThYcyG
        
       Author : jag729
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2025-01-29 16:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.vogent.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.vogent.ai)
        
       | CharlesW wrote:
       | > _Please also feel free to join our
       | Discord:https://discord.gg/JmThYcyG_
       | 
       | FYI, I get an "Invalid Invite" error.
        
         | jag729 wrote:
         | Oh weird, let me take a look at that
        
       | dvaun wrote:
       | I keep seeing similar aesthetics for landing pages and startup
       | sites. Is there some common template that's become popular for
       | this purpose?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-01-29 23:01 UTC)