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AustinZzx

14 karma · joined May 9, 2023

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AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Glad you like it!
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Hey think about the bright side of voice AI -- there are new opportunities like AI companions, AI assistant, not only the antiquated contact methodologies.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
The doc is here: https://docs.retellai.com/guide/phone-setup
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Deepgram TTS is pretty fast, but they have not publicly launched yet.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
We will keep that in mind. In the meantime, if you have a working version, we are happy to feature your integration repo in our doc.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Voice cloning is definitely on our roadmap.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
If you are referring to the LLM used in the demo, it's a simple GPT. If you are referring to audio data, there are some (not a lot) public datasets, although be careful of the license of the dataset. To get more data, you might want to build a studio to collect from contracted voice actors, or you can purchase from other sources.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
We are dedicated to preventing that from happening. Spam calling and identity theft are key areas we will build guardrails around. Feel free to let us know if you think of any other case.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Good point, note token. benchmarking is a great tool to show differentiation. BTW, apart from what we think is important ourselves (latency, mean opinion score, etc), would you mind sharing what you want to see in such a benchmark? One key metric I like to keep an eye on is the end conversion rate of using the product, but that's very use-case specific.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Nice catch on the working -- customer is indeed more accurate than user.

For outage handling: we strive to keep up 99.9 plus up time, and in the case of a dropped call, the agent would hang up if using phone, and might have different error handling in web depending on how customer handles it.

AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Thank you for the support!
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Yes, we are a developer tool, and we certainly get interest from clients working on customer satisfaction agents, call center agent training, etc.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
I totally get that clicking in Web UI is super convenient in many scenarios, and I think GUI and voice can co-exist and create synergy. Suppose AI voice agent can solve your problem, cater to your needs, and interact like a human. In that case, I believe it would be super helpful in many scenarios (like others mentioned, waiting on line for 40 minutes is a pretty bad experience). There are also new opportunities in voice like AI companion, AI assistant, etc that we see are starting to emerge.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
We are actively working on that. Thanks for the support.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Could you elaborate a bit on "my speech engine tied to a specific model provider"? Sorry, I might be lacking some context on what you are referring to here.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
You certainly could, given you play video games for long enough to gather the needed data lol.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
The demo uses a simple gpt 3.5 turbo.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
This can be handled with function calling and other features in LLM. We support the input signal of closing the call, and you can have your rule-based (timer) system or LLM-based end call functionality and use that to hang up.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Yes, I agree there are problems with LLM (hallucinations, persona, etc), and that's exciting because that means room for improvement and opportunities. I know many people who are working hard in that field trying to make LLM converse better.

For example - "hallucinations / LLMs confabulate": techniques like RAG can help - "Language is so smooth that you often need the expertise to catch them in it", fine-tuning and prompt engineering can help

AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
We handle the audio bytes in / out, and also connect to your user's server for response. We handle the interaction and decide when to listen and when to talk, and send live updates to our users. When a response is needed, we ask for it and get it from our user.

Our homepage https://www.retellai.com/ has a GIF on it that illustrates this point.

AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Thanks for the support, we still have a lot of work ahead of us to make it better!
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Thanks for the support. Means a lot to us.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Good point. Currently, our product does not contain LLM, as we are purely voice API -- instead the developer is bringing in their own LLM solutions and gets to decide what to say. This would be a great guardrail to build in for all sorts of reasons, will see how we can suggest our users adopt it.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
We strive to make conversation humanlike, so maybe less contact center ops development, but more focus on performance and customizability of voice interactions. As a startup, our edge over big tech is being nimble and executing fast.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
For TTS, we are currently integrating with different providers like Elevenlabs, Openai TTS, etc. We do have plans down the road to train our own TTS model.
AustinZzx··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
Totally understandable that most people would want to chat with a human agent (I sometimes share the same feeling). However, I do think that a major reason for that is voice bots were bad before and could not understand and get things done, and felt like waste of time. With advancements in voice AI and LLM, I'm confident that there would be more use cases where talking to a voice bot is not a bad experience.
AustinZzx··on FCC rules AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal
I think phone calls are dying, and the future of voice interface lies within apps, web, and new products like Vision Pro. At re-tell.ai, we aim to help developers create meaningful and humanlike conversations that will solve staff shortage problem, boost productivity, and unlock new opportunities. Check out our product hunt link: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/retell-ai