AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to OSS voice based conversational API with <1sec latency and other nuances
Hi 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…
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. OSS voice based conversational API with <1sec latency and other nuances launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
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 →
- 2
Have a natural, spoken conversation with AI! Contribute to KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
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 →
- 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 →
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WhisperFusion builds upon the capabilities of open source tools WhisperLive and WhisperSpeech to provide a seamless conversations with an AI chatbot.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Welcome to Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. This is a project that allows anyone to easily build their own self-hosted J.A.R.V.I.S-like voice assistant. In my mind vocal computing is the future of human-computer interaction and by open sourcing this code I hope to expedite us on that path. I have had a blast working on this so far and I'm excited to continue to build with it. It uses whisper.cpp [1], Coqui TTS [2] and OpenAI [3] to do speech-to-text, text-to-text and text-to-speech inference all 100% locally (except for text-to-text). In the future I plan to swap out OpenAI for llama.cpp [4]. It is…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A fast, open-source voice assistant powered by Groq, Cartesia, and Vercel.
2024 · swift-ai.vercel.app · 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 →
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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 →
- 10
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 →
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KugelAudio▲106Real-time text-to-speech model you can self-host
May 2026 · kugelaudio.com · its alternatives →
- 12
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 →
- 13
We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Daily Bots▲223Build voice-to-voice AI agents with any LLM with Open Source
2024 · daily.co · its alternatives →
- 15
NexTalk▲101The missing voice input for Linux. Beautiful Private Offline
Jan 2026 · nextalk.gonewx.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi HN, I'm a longtime web dev, but this is my first macOS app. Feedback is very welcome <3 I built TongueType because every dictation app I tried failed at least one of three things: it sent my audio to someone's cloud, it charged me monthly fee, or it felt clunky or enterprisy. The cloud thing kills it for anything sensitive. The subscription thing is insulting for what amounts to "Whisper + a hotkey." TongueType runs Whisper locally on Apple Silicon via CoreML. It's built to feel like a second keyboard: tap the hotkey, talk, let go, words appear. It sits in the menu bar (no dock icon, no…
May 2026 · tonguetype.app · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi everyone, we’re a small team, supported by Mozilla, who are working on re-imagining a UI for training, tuning and testing local LLMs. Everything is open source. If you’ve been training your own LLMs or have always wanted to, we’d love for you to play with the tool and give feedback on what the future development experience for LLM engineering could look like.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Henry, Matt and James here – we’re building an open source toolkit that makes it easy to integrate an LLM-powered copilot that talks to your API into software products. It works by calling API endpoints which you choose to expose to it. This lets the chatbot complete tasks within your software in response to natural language queries. It’s also open source, so you don’t have to send user data to another 3rd party. We support Llama 2, but we haven’t fine-tuned Llama 2 yet (coming soon) so highest accuracy is seen with GPT-4 or fine-tuned GPT-3.5 (much faster). We started working together 2…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19IB
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 →
- 20
Chat strategies for LLMs. Contribute to Engine-Labs/engine-core development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
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)
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22DO
Hey HN, I have been working on a side project for the last 3 months, built around LangchainJS and pgvector. It now supports ChatGPT, Llama, Claude, and Bison models, and the bot can integrate with WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord for now. I would really appreciate some feedback. Thanks! repo: https://github.com/n4ze3m/dialoqbase
2023 · its alternatives →
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- 24
AIBoox▲20Fast & affordable LLM API (Deepseek Chat V3 & Deepseek R1)
2025 · aiboox.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- An open source framework for voice assistants alternatives
- Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency alternatives
- Conversational Replicas by Tavus alternatives
- Conversational AI 2.0 From ElevenLabs alternatives
- WhisperFusion – Low-latency conversations with an AI chatbot alternatives
- Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. – open-source, self hosted, J.A.R.V.I.S. 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 →