AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Enabling end-to-end LLM-based voice driven conversational applications
Hey everyone on HN! We recently spent the past couple of weeks building out an end-to-end platform which can plug-in multiple models (both open/closed-source) to create voice driven conversational applications. We've tried to make the process simple & concise through documentation. Feel free to try it out and provide feedback. We will be launching a dashboard in the coming week for monitoring and analytics alongwith more open source models. Let us know what you all think. (if you want to contribute, we have tons of features planned - do let us know)
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. Enabling end-to-end LLM-based voice driven conversational applications launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
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…
2024 · tavus.io · its alternatives →
- 2
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 →
- 3
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 →
- 4IB
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 →
- 5
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 →
- 6
Vogent Voicelab▲171Hi HN! Voicelab is an API for optimized inference of top open-source TTS models. CSM-1B and Orpheus are the currently supported models, but we’re adding Dia, Chatterbox, Kokoro, and more in the next couple of weeks. While new ultra-realistic open-source voice models come out every month, most people still use one of a couple of closed-source providers. The reason is that these research previews can lack production-readiness; their inference stacks are usually not amenable to running things scalably (i.e. only one concurrent stream per GPU), and the public weights can generate speech of…
2025 · vogent.ai · its alternatives →
- 7RT
Hi HN -- voice chat with AI is very popular these days, especially with YC startups (https://twitter.com/k7agar/status/1769078697661804795). The current approaches all do a cascaded approach, with audio -> transcription -> language model -> text synthesis. This approach is easy to get started with, but requires lots of complexity and has a few glaring limitations. Most notably, transcription is slow, is lossy and any error propagates to the rest of the system, cannot capture emotional affect, is often not robust to code-switching/accents, and more. Instead, what…
2024 · demo.tincans.ai · its alternatives →
- 8
- 9IB
I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 10
OSS voice based conversational API with <1sec latency and other nuancesfree tier, from $0.06/mo▲8Hi Hackernews, we're Maitreya, Prateek and Marmik. Over the past few months we've been working on building a platform to build, scale and monitor voice based LLM applications. Demo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSrOmyR7oQs) 1⃣ Open Source orchestration: We're open-sourcing our orchestration to quickly setup and create LLM based voice driven conversational applications https://github.com/bolna-ai/bolna/ 2⃣ Hosted API Platform: Exposing our managed solution via APIs to build voice driven applications…
2024 · bolna.dev · its alternatives →
- 11
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 →
- 12
It’s written in Python and I call it GoalChain. It lets you build a conversation flow graph that the user traverses. When there’s enough input it spits out a dictionary with the defined fields. Otherwise it will jump state to state as led by the user. It was fun to write, and it’s surprisingly effective if you keep in mind you’re prompt-engineering every string and field name. README.md has a mini-tutorial. Would be cool to get some ideas for how to build it further and what improvements I could make.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13WB
Hi HN - we’ve been working on a new UX for building realtime voice agents with minimal code. We’ve built a ton of voice agents in the past few years. We noticed that voice agent dev follows a pretty typical pattern: ⁃ Start with a “single prompt” version that dumps all relevant context and instructions into a one prompt, and provide access to all necessary tools the agent will ever need ⁃ As the agent gets more complex and users discover more edge cases, break the single-prompt version out into a more complex structure that gives a user more control over the precise conversational flow.…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 14
we have been building an open source orchestration which enables you to plug in your own TTS/ASR/LLM for end-to-end voice conversations at -> https://github.com/bolna-ai/bolna. Few days back, was having a discussion here in HN about the possibilities of having a complete open source stack for ASR+LLM+TTS. Today, we are releasing a complete open sourced Dockerized stack by merging Bolna with Whisper ASR, Llama3 and Melo TTS.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
This is like ChatGPT but simpler, with less features (for now). It offers unlimited access to o3, Claude Sonnet 4 and other models for the pro plan. It offers access to o4-mini and the like for the free version. Requests are unlimited up to rate limits that we hope apply to less than 2% of users (they're transparent and can be seen on the account page). I was sick of having these like t3.chat or abacus.ai that give you very few messages for the $8-$10 / month subscription, so wanted to create something closer to Cursor's new pricing but transparent. Image generation will come soon, I…
2025 · donsir.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hey everyone! Many of you might have come across the Mamba paper a few days ago, which introduced an LLM based on a state space model architecture. The Mamba architecture is quite useful as its complexity scales subquadratically with input length and is therefore way more efficient than transformer models: https://github.com/state-spaces/mamba I got really excited about the paper, so I decided to fine-tune the model on a chat dataset. It turns that this actually worked quite well! The model is quite suitable for casual chatting, which honestly surprised me given that it…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17CC
Hey there HN! I believe the future of AI communication will be more voice and less text. Low-latency realistic voice interactions are finally becoming feasible. I've built a few voice-first apps on Retell AI using Elevenlabs voices. This one uses Claude Haiku for responses and Mixtral to switch between posts and comments. The AI knows about the top 30 posts and their comments on Hacker News right now. After a Google sign-in you can try it free for 10 minutes. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
2024 · callhackernews.com · its alternatives →
- 18AC
Hey HN, I'm excited to share AnyLM, a desktop app I've been working on. I love tinkering with local LLMs (via Ollama and LMStudio) but often found myself wishing for a more polished, unified UI similar to what ChatGPT offers, where all my conversations are in one place. Out of that frustration I've built AnyLM, which aims to solve that by providing a single, native application (currently for Windows, with macOS and more planned) to interact with your local models from LM Studio/Ollama but also models from api providers like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. This has been a fun (and…
2025 · anylm.app · its alternatives →
- 19IB
Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 20OS
Hey HN, it’s Russ - cofounder of LiveKit. An open source stack for building realtime AI applications. We’re sharing our first homegrown AI model for turn detection. Here’s a live demo: https://cerebras.vercel.app/ Voice AI has come a long way in the last year. We now have end-to-end systems that can generate a response to user input in 300-500ms — human level speeds! As latency reduces, a common problem that surfaces is the LLM responds too quickly. Any time there’s a short pause in a user’s speech, it ends up interrupting them. This is largely due to how voice AI applications…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 21HP
Hi HN. I heard you like dev tools and AI, so we wanted to share our project that we’ve been working on. We’re working on Horizon [1] - a higher level abstraction for LLMs so that developers can spend less time trying to grapple with LLMs to make them work and more time with users. This is the starting feature set which takes an auto-ML approach to identify the optimal LLM model, hyperparameters, and prompt - instead of just giving you the tooling to figure it out yourself. You can read more about it in our documentations. Our view is that as LLMs become increasingly commoditized and prompts…
2023 · gethorizon.ai · its alternatives →
- 22
Hey HN, This newsletter didn’t come from a growth hack or content strategy. It started with frustration. Every week, I was drowning in blogs, PR blasts, and Twitter threads trying to keep up with Voice + AI. New models dropping. Partnerships overnight. Startups in India and Asia pushing infra upgrades that no one was covering. But whenever I wanted to know what really mattered, the signal was buried under the noise. And there wasn’t a single newsletter focused on India’s Voice AI ecosystem — most only covered the US. So I built the thing I wished existed: Voice AI Stack — a newsletter on…
2025 · videosdkweekly.substack.com · its alternatives →
- 23SY
Hi HN, I built Lengpal, a simple language exchange platform where two people get instantly matched on video to practice their native and target languages. There’s a timer built in so both sides get equal time to speak. I created this because I wanted something beyond passive apps like Duolingo. Something to actually speak with real people without the hassle of scheduling or chat fatigue. Right now we are testing the concept with a waitlist. We’ve collected 77 emails so far from Reddit and IndieHackers. I would love your feedback before launching the MVP. Site:…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 24HM
Hey HN, this is Harsh from Hathora. We started as a game server hosting company and are launching a new offering today centered around voice models, leveraging our existing platform that runs game servers. We hope to achieve a few things with this product: 1. Democratized access to a wide variety of open source and licensed voice models 2. Ability to mix and match speech to text, reasoning (llm), and text to speech models to form inference chains for agentic voice workflows 3. Focus on latency reduction via (a) running models in 14+ regions around the globe, and (b) colocating models in the…
Nov 2025 · models.hathora.dev · its alternatives →
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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 →