Hey HN, I’m 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’re everything between raw models (like the realtime API) and end-users interacting with voice agents over telephony or within applications.

We’ve been around for about 1.5yrs. Vapi was born out of a personal frustration—I 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’s challenge is reliability: can these voice agents consistently perform in production? What we’ve learned deploying 1000s of them: Yes, but it's really hard.

Why? Real-time is unweildy—coordinating 10+ third party real-time models, handling diverse, unconstrained inputs and outputs, with no latency budget for reasoning and reflection. Voice interactions don’t 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’re 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 (10–60+ minutes) with 99.95% uptime.

Questions we’re 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’t?

- 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’s 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’s 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!

user:	humford
created:	July 7, 2017
karma:	10
about:	Student at Columbia University. htw2116@columbia.edu