AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Conversational Replicas by Tavus
Hey there, I’m Brian. I've been shipping conversational models over here at Tavus for the past two years. I want to tell you about our new audio-understanding model: Sparrow-2! It’s a new category of model and a unique new approach to conversational audio. Earlier this year we launched Sparrow-1, (at the time) our SoTA turn taking model. Since our Sparrow-1 launch, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to humans talking and trying to really understand how people know when to talk, when to listen, and when to wait. I’ve also been hunting down failure modes of the current SoTA models. And while…
Conversational Replicas by Tavus is a platform for developers to build real-time video conversations with digital twins that can speak, see, and hear. The system processes interactions with less than a second of… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Conversational Replicas by Tavus launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1AR
Hey it’s Hassaan & Quinn – co-founders of Tavus, an AI research company and developer platform for video APIs. We’ve been building AI video models for ‘digital twins’ or ‘avatars’ since 2020. We’re sharing some of the challenges we faced building an AI video interface that has realistic conversations with a human, including getting it to under 1 second of latency. To try it, talk to Hassaan’s digital twin: https://www.hassaanraza.com, or to our "demo twin" Carter: https://www.tavus.io We built this because until now, we've had to adapt communication to the limits of…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 2
Luke from ElevenLabs here. We just released Scribe Realtime v2, our new real-time Speech to Text model. We rebuilt it from the ground up around a new architecture that uses predictive transcription – it anticipates the next likely word before it’s spoken. That makes it both fast (around 150 ms latency) and highly accurate. Scribe v2 Realtime outperforms every low latency transcription model across 30 commonly used EU and Asian languages – 93.5% accuracy, compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash (91.4%), GPT-4o MiniTranscribe (90.7%), and Deepgram Nova 3 (85%). It supports 90+ languages including…
2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →
- 3
I built a voice agent from scratch that averages ~400ms end-to-end latency (phone stop → first syllable). That’s with full STT → LLM → TTS in the loop, clean barge-ins, and no precomputed responses. What moved the needle: Voice is a turn-taking problem, not a transcription problem. VAD alone fails; you need semantic end-of-turn detection. The system reduces to one loop: speaking vs listening. The two transitions - cancel instantly on barge-in, respond instantly on end-of-turn - define the experience. STT → LLM → TTS must stream. Sequential pipelines are dead on arrival for natural…
Mar 2026 · ntik.me · its alternatives →
- 4
I've been obsessed for the past ~year with the possibilities of talking to LLMs. I built a bunch of one-off prototypes, shared code on X, started a Meetup group in SF, and co-hosted a big hackathon. It turns out that there are a few low-level problems that everybody building conversational/real-time AI needs to solve on the way to building/shipping something that works well: low-latency media transport, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, phrase endpointing, pipelining data between models/services, handling voice interruptions, swapping out different…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6S2
Have a real conversation with a Tavus PAL and watch Sparrow-2 read it live: who holds the floor, who is acknowledging, and who just cut in.
Sep 2026 · sparrow2.tavuslabs.org · its alternatives →
- 7IB
Hi HN, I built this out of frustration of the evergrowing list of AI models and features to try and to fit my workflow. The visual approach clicks for me so i went with it, it provides more freedom and control of the outcome, because predictable results and increased productivity is what I’m after when using conversational AI. The app is packed with features, my most used are prompt library, voice input and text search, narration is useful too. The app is local-first and works right in the browser, no sign up needed and it's absolutely free to try. BYOAK – bring your own API Keys. Let me…
2024 · grafychat.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Inworld TTSfree tier, from $25/mo▲318Hey HN, this is Igor, one of the engineers behind Inworld Runtime, which we're releasing today in public preview. We built it to solve the common problem we and our customers had: engineers spend more time on AI ops and plumbing than on actual feature development. This was often due to the challenge of using Python for I/O-bound, high-concurrency workloads and complexity maintaining pipelines with streams that use always-changing ML models. Our solution is a high-performance runtime written in C++ with the core idea of defining AI logic as graphs. For instance, a basic voice-to-voice…
2025 · inworld.ai · its alternatives →
- 9
MARS5 TTS▲489Open-source, insanely prosodic text-to-speech model
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Have a natural, spoken conversation with AI! Contribute to KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Pinch▲535Hey HN! I’m Christian, daily lurker and some might remember our original launch post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42935355). Today we're launching Pinch for Mac, which we believe is a step-change improvement in real-time AI translation. Our vision is to make cross-lingual conversations feel as natural as regular conversations. TL:DR During an online meeting, the app instantly transcribes and translates all audio you hear, and allows you to decide when you translate your voice and when you don't. It's invisible to others (like Granola), and works everywhere without any…
2025 · startpinch.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80/20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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- 15
Fast, accurate STT for production-grade voice agents
May 2026 · ringg.ai · its alternatives →
- 16
Clevr▲147My friend and i built this because we were trying to just learn things in a more fun and interactive way. We think there's a community we could build around this? And there's definitely a lot of work to do. Super curious to see what you guys think, and where we can make the learning experience better.
2025 · theclevr.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I work on real-time voice/video AI at Tavus and for the past few years, I’ve mostly focused on how machines respond in a conversation. One thing that’s always bothered me is that almost all conversational systems still reduce everything to transcripts, and throw away a ton of signals that need to be used downstream. Some existing emotion understanding models try to analyze and classify into small sets of arbitrary boxes, but they either aren’t fast / rich enough to do this with conviction in real-time. So I built a multimodal perception system which gives us a way to encode visual…
Feb 2026 · raven.tavuslabs.org · its alternatives →
- 18
Orpheus TTS▲152Open-source TTS with emotion & voice cloning
2025 · canopylabs.ai · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey everyone, I've been hacking on this idea with a friend as we've been using chatgpt and other AI tools in our day to day work and find ourselves copy/pasting to each other frequently. We often share chatgpt links with each other, but it's been frustrating that they are read-only and we can't pickup the conversation or both talk to an LLM with shared context. We built a shared chatroom to explore what it'd be like to talk with multiple LLMs and humans in the same chat, and so far it feels pretty cool, but we're curious if anyone else would find it useful as well. Right now you can: -…
2025 · chord.chat · its alternatives →
- 20
Ojin▲106Talk to an AI Agent with a real face and voice, in real time
Aug 2026 · ojin.ai · its alternatives →
- 21
The Emotion Engine has 32 MB of RAM total, so the trick is streaming weights from CD-ROM one matrix at a time during the forward pass — only activations, KV cache and embeddings live in RAM. This means models bigger than the RAM can still run, they just read more from disc. Had to build a custom quantized format (PSNT), hack endianness, write a tokenizer pipeline, and most of the PS2 SDK from scratch (releasing that separately). The model itself is also custom — a 10M param Llama-style architecture I trained specifically for this. And it works. On real hardware.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Video demonstration: https://youtu.be/bJFa5HOmhl4 I created a demo involving ChatGPT, OpenAI's Whisper running on-device for speech-to-text (because why not?), and ARKit. By defining a custom JavaScript environment with JavaScriptCore and describing it to ChatGPT, I was able to get it to produce functioning scripts that instantiate and manipulate 3D objects. Sketchfab is used to import 3D assets on the fly. Google Poly had a much better catalog of assets for this sort of thing but sadly, it's no longer available. The README.md describes how it all works but the gist of it is…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Hey guys, This is Akshat from CAMB.AI. Today's we're super pumped to introduce MARS5, a fully open-source (commercially usable) TTS with break-through prosody and realism available on our Github: https://www.github.com/camb-ai/mars5-tts Watch our release demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmJSLPYrKtE Why is it different? MARS5 is able to replicate performances (from 2-3s of audio reference) in 140+ languages, even for extremely tough prosodic scenarios like sports commentary, movies, anime and more; hard prosody that most closed-source and…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I trained the 65b model on my texts so I can talk to myself. It's pretty useless as an assistant, and will only do stuff you convince it to, but I guess it's technically uncensored? I'll leave it up for a bit if you want to chat with it. I posted this to Reddit and had several hundred people talking to it. Salient points from that discussion: LLAMA 1 65b Rank 128 5 epochs Batch size 1, 256 cutoff Trained in the Oobabooga suite using bitsandbytes 4-bit quantization for the lora Loss around 1.5 seems to give the most coherent results Trained on raw text dumps that is then parsed by a crappy…
2023 · airic.serveo.net · its alternatives →
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- A real time AI video agent with under 1 second of latency alternatives
- Conversational AI 2.0 From ElevenLabs alternatives
- I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch alternatives
- An open source framework for voice assistants alternatives
- I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work alternatives
- Sparrow-2 – Noise cancellation isn't designed for conversational AI alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →