{"author":"jordandearsley","children":[{"author":"sahilsuman933","children":[],"created_at":"2025-04-02T18:57:59.000Z","created_at_i":1743620279,"id":43560178,"options":[],"parent_id":43556789,"points":null,"story_id":43556789,"text":"Hey HN, Sahil here from Vapi! Working here feels like we're hosting our own voice Olympics\u2014juggling 10+ real-time models, dodging latency ninjas, and making every call sound like a chart-topping hit. It\u2019s a wild ride, but nothing beats the thrill of watching our voice agents nail it (and sometimes even out-charm us humans). If you\u2019ve got questions about our secret sauce or just want to chat about how voice tech is turning everyday calls into epic adventures, I\u2019m all ears (pun intended)! Cheers to making voice as playful as it is powerful!","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"ashwin110","children":[],"created_at":"2025-04-02T19:00:55.000Z","created_at_i":1743620455,"id":43560230,"options":[],"parent_id":43556789,"points":null,"story_id":43556789,"text":"Love the call demo, fun way to show the product. What are some interesting products users have built with this that they've shared with you?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"arvindrk","children":[],"created_at":"2025-04-02T19:11:19.000Z","created_at_i":1743621079,"id":43560369,"options":[],"parent_id":43556789,"points":null,"story_id":43556789,"text":"As one of Vapi\u2019s founding engineers, I am constantly inspired by the ingenious ways developers are harnessing our platform. I\u2019ve been a passionate user of Vapi long before I joined the team, and I take immense pride in contributing to the groundbreaking innovations we see every day. It\u2019s incredibly fulfilling to witness our product empower creators to build transformative solutions.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"humford","children":[],"created_at":"2025-04-02T19:29:24.000Z","created_at_i":1743622164,"id":43560558,"options":[],"parent_id":43556789,"points":null,"story_id":43556789,"text":"Called the demo number, sounds smooth! Good luck.","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null},{"author":"jasondigitized","children":[],"created_at":"2025-04-03T02:50:58.000Z","created_at_i":1743648658,"id":43564162,"options":[],"parent_id":43556789,"points":null,"story_id":43556789,"text":"Why should I use vapi vs eleven labs?","title":null,"type":"comment","url":null}],"created_at":"2025-04-02T14:00:53.000Z","created_at_i":1743602453,"id":43556789,"options":[],"parent_id":null,"points":12,"story_id":43556789,"text":"Hey HN, I\u2019m Jordan, founder of Vapi. For the past 1.5 years, we've been building voice infrastructure designed to help developers easily create, test, and deploy voice agents. We\u2019re everything between raw models (like the realtime API) and end-users interacting with voice agents over telephony or within applications.

We\u2019ve been around for about 1.5yrs. Vapi was born out of a personal frustration\u2014I wanted to build my own voice agent but found existing solutions extremely limited. Back then, there were only a handful of voice AI startups. Since March 2024, we've witnessed a Cambrian explosion of new entrants.

In the early days, the biggest challenge was always latency. But as models have rapidly improved and funding has flooded into the space, voice agents are now trusted for business-critical applications like prior authorizations, payment processing, and customer support.

Today\u2019s challenge is reliability: can these voice agents consistently perform in production? \nWhat we\u2019ve learned deploying 1000s of them: Yes, but it's really hard.

Why? Real-time is unweildy\u2014coordinating 10+ third party real-time models, handling diverse, unconstrained inputs and outputs, with no latency budget for reasoning and reflection. Voice interactions don\u2019t follow a linear flow like text, making determinism a challenge. Getting it right takes a ton of tuning and iteration.

Our approach does not simplify, it assumes it will be hard. We\u2019re built for developers. We expose extensive configuration options through an API-native platform, including custom models, 100+ integrations, and detailed call testing and monitoring features.

--

Tldr; it works!

- We achieve performance equivalent to humans for use cases with clear user intent (appointment bookings, support, etc.).

- We've handled over 44M voice calls across support automation, healthcare intake, and logistics.

- We reliably manage long-running jobs (10\u201360+ minutes) with 99.95% uptime.

Questions we\u2019re still exploring:

- When you have a complex product with 1000s of nobs, how do you help developers wield them, without heavy consulting?

- How do you detect and eliminate bad actors when the line can be blurry / not enough context to make the call on what is fraud and what isn\u2019t?

- How do you guarantee reliability when we are built on services that are less reliable than industry standard (e.g. OpenAI posts < 99.9% uptime)

--

You can try a live agent by calling: 1-844-HEY-VAPI. Yes, that\u2019s my voice.

Docs: https://docs.vapi.ai/introduction

Let me know if you have any questions about voice; the market or the tech. Happy to poke the eng team to chat on architecture, etc. if it\u2019s of interest.

PS- we are also launching on product hunt today. we got an awesome team working really hard to make that happen, so pls support, thanks!","title":"Show HN: 1-844-HEY-VAPI \u2013 voice AI platform for developers","type":"story","url":null}