nowfound

AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Silero VAD

One voice detector to rule them all

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 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier. Silero VAD launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  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
    Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbofree tier, from $6/mo▲175

    Elevenlabs' fastest and most emotive voice models yet

    26d ago · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    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 →

  5. 5

    Build Powerful Voice Agents

    2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is a crucial component for Voice AI, enabling more natural and efficient interactions. TEN VAD is an open-source solution designed to supercharge your Voice AI Agents with lightning-fast, human-like conversations! TEN VAD offers some key advantages: ONNX Support: Deploy on virtually any platform or hardware architecture! This means greater flexibility and easier integration into your existing systems. Superior Detection Accuracy: Experience noticeable improvements in voice detection, leading to fewer errors and more reliable performance. Smaller & Faster: Enjoy…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Highly expressive and natural speech generation model

    2025 · microsoft.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Production ASR for noisy multilingual audio

    Apr 2026 · microsoft.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    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. 10

    A neural net for speech recognition

    2022 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    :speech_balloon: An On-Premises, Streaming Speech Recognition System - GitHub - iceychris/LibreASR: :speech_balloon: An On-Premises, Streaming Speech Recognition System

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    State-of-the-art (ranked #1 Aug 2022) German Speech Recognition in 284 lines of C++. This is a 100% private 100% offline 100% free CLI tool. - DeutscheKI/tevr-asr-tool

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    Vois 2.0▲105

    The ElevenLabs alternative with unlimited generation

    Aug 2026 · vois.so · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    Voicrfree▲254

    Your voice in, polished text out — in seconds

    Mar 2026 · voicr.pro · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Next-Gen Speech-to-Text with Unmatched Performance

    2023 · deepgram.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    VoxCPM2▲110

    Open-source 48kHz TTS with voice design and cloning

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Level Up Your Audio with Realistic AI Voices

    2025 · minimax.io · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    Voysis▲111

    The complete independent Voice AI platform

    2018 · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    Vocol.AI▲140

    All-in-one voice collaboration platform

    2023 · vocol.ai · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    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 →

  21. 21

    High-Quality Text-To-Speech Running On 1 CPU Core Locally

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22
    Murmur▲75

    A private voice-first notepad for your thoughts

    29d ago · murmurr.subhr.in · its alternatives →

  23. 23
    Polymer▲71

    A polyphonic voice distributor app for Mac

    2014 · polymer-app.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hi, I'm Kamil and I'm a founder of Applied AI agency in Warsaw, Poland. We've trained a small <1MB voice classifier model that runs on CPU in 4ms. Can be run next to silero VAD in voice AI deployments. What we noticed in production deployments of voice assistants in Contact Centers in EU is that human consultants pick up immediately how to inflect verbs and ajdectives after one utterance from the caller. But voice AI agents don't know it until 1-2 minutes into the call when they are either corrected or the caller uses explicitly words with male&#x2F;female form a couple of times. Our model…

    May 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

Also compare

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 →