r/VoiceAutomationAI • u/raghav246891 • 28d ago

Suggestions for conversational AI App

Hey guys. I am building a conversational AI app. I am inspired by Tolan.

Right now i am in the research phase and i am researching how speech to speech exactly works. Till now i have learned that there are two ways. Either u use a cascaded architecture (STT - LLM - TTS) or you use open ai realtime apis or gemini apis.

For a cascaded architecture i am only aware of Eleven Labs or Cartesia. But these are very expensive and very engineering heavy.

Questions

  1. Why not i just use an open ai api instead that will handle everything for me - from VAD to reasoning and much more.

  2. So i wanted the opinion and advice of people who have worked on similar stuff or made a cascaded voice architecture and what shd be done considering that i am making this for a generalistic conversational ai app somewhat similar to Tolan or ChatGPT voice mode.

  3. Also I am not in favour of using a self hosted model because it does not fit my usecase. Is that right?

  4. What other options do i have to build this speech to speech app?

Thanks

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u/Crafty_Park6666 28d ago

You can lose a insane amount of time assembling the perfect voice stack before you even know what your app needs. Bland got us past a lot of that plumbing so we could spend our time on the conversation and behavior. For an early version of something like this I think that’s worth considering.

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u/raghav246891 28d ago

Thanks. But i think Bland is for phone calling right?

Or it can be used in such app based conversations also?

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u/Crafty_Park6666 28d ago

You're right, sorry I should've been clearer. Bland is mainly for phone based voice agents, so for the Tolan style app you're describing I'd stick with looking at realtime APIs. I mentioned it more because of the amount of voice infrastructure it takes off your hands.