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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Gabber

Low-latency inference for VLM, TTS, and STT with orchestration for making realtime apps.

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.

  1. 1

    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 →

  2. 2

    Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Tighter instruction adherence in speech agents

    Feb 2026 · developers.openai.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    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 →

  5. 5
    Outspeed▲462

    Platform for realtime voice and video AI

    2024 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    First TTS model to support all 22 Indic languages + English

    2024 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Build Powerful Voice Agents

    2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Inworld TTSfree tier, from $25/mo▲318

    Hey 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 →

  10. 10
    Vapi▲547

    Voice AI agents for Developers

    2025 · vapi.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    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 →

  12. 12

    Have a natural, spoken conversation with AI! Contribute to KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    The fastest generative AI Text-to-Speech API

    2023 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    The open-source framework for real-time AI voice

    2025 · videosdk.live · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Fast, expressive, open source TTS with native watermarking

    Dec 2025 · resemble.ai · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Open-source TTS with emotion & voice cloning

    2025 · canopylabs.ai · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Fast, accurate STT for production-grade voice agents

    May 2026 · ringg.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Speech Intellect is the first STT/TTS solution

    2023 · speechllect.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    Qwen3-TTS▲155

    Voice design, cloning & 97ms streaming

    Jan 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi 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 →

  23. 23

    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 →

  24. 24

    The most accurate streaming speech model for voice agents.

    Mar 2026 · assemblyai.com · 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 →