AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Open-source turn detection model for voice AI
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…
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. Open-source turn detection model for voice AI launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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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 →
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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 →
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Have a natural, spoken conversation with AI! Contribute to KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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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 →
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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 →
- 7

Last year when GPT-4 was released I started making lots of little voice + LLM experiments. Voice interfaces are fun; there are several interesting new problem spaces to explore. I'm convinced that voice is going to be a bigger and bigger part of how we all interact with generative AI. But one thing that's hard, today, is building voice bots that respond as quickly as humans do in conversation. A 500ms voice-to-voice response time is just barely possible with today's AI models. You can get down to 500ms if you: host transcription, LLM inference, and voice generation all together in one place;…
2024 · fastvoiceagent.cerebrium.ai · its alternatives →
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Avaturn Live▲320AI avatars 9X faster, 4X expressive range w/, human fidelity
Nov 2025 · avaturn.live · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Premium AI voice quality without the premium price tag.
2025 · async.com · its alternatives →
- 11

TLDR: We created a personalised Andrej Karpathy tutor that can response to questions about his Youtube videos in sub 1 second responses (voice-to-voice). We do this using a voice enabled RAG agent. See later in the post for demo link, Github Repo and blog write up. A few weeks ago we released the worlds fastest voice bot, achieving 500ms voice-to-voice response times, including a 200ms delay waiting for a user to stop speaking. After reaching the front page of HN, we thought about how we could take this a step further based on feedback we were getting from the community. Many companies were…
2024 · educationbot.cerebrium.ai · its alternatives →
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Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653752
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ojin▲106Talk to an AI Agent with a real face and voice, in real time
Aug 2026 · ojin.ai · its alternatives →
- 15

Tighter instruction adherence in speech agents
Feb 2026 · developers.openai.com · its alternatives →
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OpenWispr▲190100% local open source AI speech-to-text model
2025 · openwhispr.com · its alternatives →
- 17

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 →
- 18

A fast, open-source voice assistant powered by Groq, Cartesia, and Vercel.
2024 · swift-ai.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 19IU
Hi Hacker News, This is definitely out of my comfort zone. I just wanted to show you guys because I'm super proud of it. It's a 100% faithful recreation based off of the schematics, patents, and ROMs that were found online. So please watch the video and tell me what you think https://youtu.be/auOlZXI1VxA The reason why I think this is relevant is because I've been a programmer for 25 years and AI scares the shit out of me. I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
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Voxos is an open-source desktop voice assistant that aims to put Clippy to shame while supporting new desktop workflows powered by LLMs. Tired of copy and pasting ChatGPT responses between your web browser and IDE? Does your copilot not quite do what you need it to do? I invite you to give Voxos a try and maybe even become a contributor!
2024 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →
- 22RT
Avaturn.live is a voice-to-voice AI assistant that lets you speak to an avatar in real time. We managed to reach <0.5 sec response time so that the conversation with an avatar feels more natural. Also what do you think about our lip sync? We were struggling a lot to reach our current level. Initial use case we're exploring: Automated product demos/sales, where the AI avatar can showcase features and answer questions in real-time. Demo: https://dashboard.avaturn.live/demo You can try talking to an avatar about anything
2024 · dashboard.avaturn.live · its alternatives →
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Talk like anime girl in realtime on your next call
Sep 2026 · voicechanger.live · its alternatives →
- 24IB
Hello Hacker News, When learning foreign languages, I made the most progress by speaking them throughout the day, every day. So I made a site where you can *speak* to an AI language teacher to practice both listening and speaking. # The product *What I have now:* * Multilingual speech recognition: You can ask a question in English and get an answer in your target language. * Feedback on your grammar. * Suggestions: See examples of what to say next to keep the conversation flowing. * Speed: Choose a lower speed for beginners or a faster one for advanced levels. * Translations: Click to see a…
2023 · gliglish.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 →