Alternatives
Products that do what We open sourced Vapi – UI included does
We kept hitting the same wall building voice AI systems. Pipecat and LiveKit are great projects, genuinely. But getting it to production took us weeks of plumbing - wiring things together, handling barge-ins, setting up telephony, Knowledge base, tool calls, handling barge in etc. And every time we needed to tweak agent behavior, you were back in the code and redeploying. We just wanted to change a prompt and test it in 30 seconds. Thats why Vapi retell etc exist. So we wrote the entire code and open sourced it as a Visual drag-and-drop for voice agents ( same as vapi or n8n for voice).…
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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
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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
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Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN. We're Mus and Isaac - creators of LightLayer. We've been outputting a ton more code since using agentic dev tools. It's been great. But we're starting to see a new bottleneck emerge that's no longer writing the actual code: reviewing code. We’d love to hear from folks here if they’re feeling the inertia of code reviews a lot more these days with the surge in development velocity. For us, it was the reason we decided to pivot what we were working on before, and go full-time on building a workspace aimed at bringing the code review experience up to speed for the AI era. To be clear:…
2025 · lightlayer.dev
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Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com
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2025 · github.com
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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
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We kept seeing the same problem: creators make great content but the moment they dub it into another language, everything falls apart. Robotic voice. Music gone. Meaning lost. Lips not matching. So we built Vaani. Whatever language you create in, wherever you are in the world, your content can reach a global audience. We clone your voice, match your gestures, preserve your music, and optionally sync your lips to the new language. 10+ Indian languages, 20+ global languages, all in minutes. We built it for 2 reasons: So creators never have to sound like a robot in another language again So the…
Jun 2026 · vaani.media
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Hi HN, I'm the creator of AVA - AI Voice Agent for Asterisk My repo was shared here once before by someone else so I wanted to follow up with the progress since then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380399 I've been working with Asterisk/FreePBX systems for years. I wanted to add AI voice capabilities to legacy phone systems without paying per-minute SaaS fees or ripping out the entire telephony stack. So I built AVA, a self-hosted AI voice agent that can integrate into any traditional phone system. While most solutions demand expensive migrations to cloud-only…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN! I've never posted anything on here before, but this project was too fun to pass up. I've been learning a lot about agents lately, and wanted to see if I could replicate some of the results of Windsurf and Cursor. Generally I love these tools, but when you're stuck behind an "enterprise" firewall, they don't work as well. This sad state of affairs motivated me to understand SWE agents more. Does it work? Yes. Is it as good as Cursor and Windsurf? Not quite, but it's pretty darn close, depending on the model you use. I'm lacking a few features like semantic indexing, MCP support, but…
2025 · github.com
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Hey HN! Janak here from Outspeed (https://outspeed.com). We’re excited to show you Outspeed : a purpose-built platform for realtime voice & video AI applications. Here’s a demo of some cool apps you can create using Outspeed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a11LQIlXelM Outspeed emerged from our frustration of needing to stitch together multiple tools such as livekit, vocode, langflow, silero etc. just to make a simple voice bot. Even after all that hard work, it still wasn’t production-ready. So we decided to work on a complete framework that could stand production…
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN, I’m Ashu, founder of VideoDB. I’ve spent a big chunk of my life building video infrastructure. Not video creation. Video plumbing. The stuff you only learn after production breaks: timebases, VFR, keyframes, audio sync drift, container quirks, partial uploads, live streams, retries, backpressure, codecs, ffmpeg flags, cost blowups, and “why is this clip unseekable on one player but fine on another”. This week we shared VideoDB Skills, a skill pack that lets AI agents call those infra primitives directly, instead of you wiring pipelines with screenshots plus FFmpeg glue. Repo:…
Mar 2026
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Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh
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Hi, I have been building small AI Agents for quite some time now using various frameworks and one thing that always bugged me was that iterating on small things like prompts, flows, tools etc always took a code change + deployment of the app. While the prompt part can be solved with Langfuse I haven't found a good way to keep the flow management remote (and open source). Lately I have been working with Genkit (https://github.com/firebase/genkit) and love how modular it is. So I thought why not build a UI builder on top of that that can handle simple flows, prompts and…
Sep 2025
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For a fun side weekend project we gave our own OpenClaw agent called "Mahmut" a face and had a live interview with it. It went surprisingly well. Here's a sneak peek from the interview: https://x.com/ptservlor/status/2024597444890128767 User speaks, Deepgram transcribes it, OpenClaw Gateway routes it to your agent, ElevenLabs turns the response into speech, and LemonSlice generates a lip synced avatar from the audio. Everything streams over LiveKit in real time. Latency is about 1 to 2 seconds end to end depending on the LLM. The lip sync from LemonSlice honestly…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!
2024 · saas-quick.com
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CharacterAI has over 20M active users and lets people talk to AI voice clones. I built a local alternative that clones any voice with <10s of audio and can talk fluently in over 10 languages, and runs locally on your Macbook or Mac mini. The voice pipeline currently supports MLX on any M1 through M5 chip. I used Whisper-Turbo for STT, Qwen3.5-9B-4bit for the LLM and Qwen3-TTS-0.6B-4bit for TTS. The repo also has a Websocket Transport to add these voices to devices powered by the ESP32 via secure websockets.
Mar 2026 · github.com
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I’ve been working on an SDK for creating voice AI apps. If you’ve ever wanted to make consumer voice apps, this is for you. There are some neat ideas in here that I’m really proud of: the decorators make everything very readable, and the prompting system is wonderfully dynamic. The basic setup command is: npx create-pocket-app This will create a Next.js app that’s ready to deploy. Check out the live examples on the home page to get a feel for what’s possible, and to see the code!
2025 · pocketcomputer.com
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Hey HN! Have been working on Audentic, a platform that simplifies adding voice AI to your website. Think of it as a copy-paste voice assistant that you can embed directly into your site. Setting up voice AI has traditionally been a bit of a hassle, often requiring juggling multiple components like speech recognition, text processing, and text-to-speech systems. With Audentic, we've streamlined this into a more straightforward, end-to-end voice model. While OpenAI's Realtime API has made real-time, multimodal AI interactions more feasible, integrating these capabilities into a website can…
2025 · audentic.io
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