Voice AI Developer Stack
Build phone agents, voice interfaces, and speech-powered products, with the transcription, synthesis, and conversation management tools developers use.
Our Take
Built for a developer shipping a real voice product, a phone agent or voice interface, not someone experimenting with text-to-speech for a video. Deepgram and ElevenLabs split the pipeline, transcription in and synthesis out, and Vapi or Retell handle the conversation orchestration between them, you likely only need one of Vapi or Retell depending on which integrates better with your existing telephony stack. This is infrastructure, not a finished product, expect real integration work before anything ships.
True Cost & Exit
What this stack really costs to run, and how you'd leave it.
Monthly cost
from $13/mo fixed (ElevenLabs Starter + ChatGPT Go), plus per-minute usage fees for Vapi, Deepgram, and Retell AI that scale with call volume and have no fixed floor
Lean alternative
Pick Vapi or Retell AI, not both, based on telephony integration; Deepgram and ElevenLabs' pay-as-you-go tiers mean a low-volume prototype can run for single-digit dollars a month before real call volume arrives.
Exit path
Call recordings and transcripts are the real asset here, held across whichever conversation-orchestration vendor and Deepgram you pick; none of these five vendors publishes a formal export policy, so confirm call-recording export and retention terms directly before scaling call volume.
Tools in This Stack
Build and deploy voice AI agents that handle phone calls, SMS, and chat at enterprise scale with sub-500ms latency.
Convert speech to text (and text to speech) in real time via API on Nova-3, so developers add voice understanding to their apps with usage-based per-minute billing.
Clone a voice or narrate anything with Eleven v3, the most natural-sounding TTS available. API pricing just dropped to pay-as-you-go with no subscription required.
Power phone and chat agents that sound natural in conversation, assembled from any mix of LLM, voice, and telephony provider.
Your go-to for drafts, research, brainstorming, and first passes on almost anything, now with an agentic Work mode that runs multi-step tasks for you.