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Asterisk AI Voice Agent
- looneysquash 9mo agoThat seems like bad news for Allison. Though I know she already had some TTS voices available, so many not.
- kamma4434 9mo agoShe seems to be doing well https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wairnc-2Hyo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wairnc-2Hyo
- johnebgd 9mo agoI welcome the spam calls from our asterisk overlords.
- VladVladikoff 9mo agoI’m honestly surprised it hasn’t been more prevalent yet. I still get call centre type spam calls where you can hear all the background noise of the rest of the call centre.
- userbinator 9mo agoIs the background noise real, or is it also AI-generated to make you think that it's a human?
- tartoran 9mo agoThe background noise is a recording for sure, no AI needed, just a background noise audiofile in a loop would do.
- VladVladikoff 9mo agoWhy though? It adds nothing positive, it only makes me sure it is a scam call.
- the_af 9mo agoI assume it's to make it seem like an actual call center rather than a scam. I recently got two phone scam attempts (credit card related) that sounded exactly like this.
- ldenoue 9mo agoI built a voice AI stack and background noise can be really helpful to a restaurant AI for example. Italian background music or cafe background is part of the brand. It’s not meant to make the caller believe this is not a bot but only to make the AI call on brand.
- grim_io 9mo agoYou can call it what ever you like, but to me this is deceptive. Where is the difference between this and Indian support staff pretending to be in your vicinity by telling you about the local weather? Your version is arguably even worse because it can plausibly fool people more competently.
- ldenoue 9mo agoIt doesn't have to be. You can configure your bot to great the user. E.g. "Aleksandra is not available at the moment, but I'm her AI assistant to help you book a table. How may I help you?" So you're telling the caller that it is an AI, and yet you can have a pleasant background audio experience.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoyou actually answer unknown callers?
- haroldp 9mo agoI was more thinking I could add it to my Asterisk server to honey-pot the spam callers into an infinite time waster cycle.
- krater23 9mo agoPlease don't. I had a talk with a shitty AI bot on a Fedex line. It's absolute crap. Just give me a 'Type 1 for x, type 2 for y'. Then I don't need to guess what are the possibilities.
- EvanAnderson 9mo agoVoice-controlled phone systems are hugely rage-inducing for me. I am often in loud setting with background chatter. Muting my audio and using a touchtone keypad is so much more accurate and easy than having to find a quiet place and worrying that somebody is going to say something that the voice response system detects.
- ssl-3 9mo agoI hate those, too. Especially when others are around. The interface is so inconsistent between different implementations that they're always terribly awkward to navigate at best, and completely infuriating at worst. I don't like presenting the image of an progressively-angrier man who is standing around and speaking incongruous short phrases that are clearly directed towards nobody at all. But I've found that many of them still accept DTMF. Just mash a button instead of utter a response, and a more-traditional IVR tree shows up with a spoken list of enumerated options. Things get a lot better after that. Like pushing buttons at the gas pump to try to silence the ad-roll, it's pretty low-cost to try.
- 9x39 9mo agoOne problem is once you’re in deep building a phone IVR workflow beyond X or Y (yes, these are intentional), callers don’t care about some deep and featured input menu. They just mash 0 or pick a random option and demand a human finish the job and transfer them - understandably. When you’re committed to phone intent complexity (hell), the AI assisted options are sort of less bad since you don’t have to explain the menu to callers, they just make demands.
- tartoran 9mo agoWhat if the goal is to keep gaslighting you until you give up your demands?
- nextworddev 9mo agoCan I connect this to Twilio
- VladVladikoff 9mo agoTechnically yes, twilio has sip trunks.
- kwindla 9mo agoOne easy way to build voice agents and connect them to Twilio is the Pipecat open source framework. Pipecat supports a wide variety of network transports, including the Twilio MediaStream WebSocket protocol so you don't have to bounce through a SIP server. Here's a getting started doc.[1] (If you do need SIP, this Asterisk project looks really great.) Pipecat has 90 or so integrations with all the models/services people use for voice AI these days. NVIDIA, AWS, all the foundation labs, all the voice AI labs, most of the video AI labs, and lots of other people use/contribute to Pipecat. And there's lots of interesting stuff in the ecosystem, like the open source, open data, open training code Smart Turn audio turn detection model [2], and the Pipecat Flows state machine library [3]. [1] - https://docs.pipecat.ai/guides/telephony/twilio-websockets https://docs.pipecat.ai/guides/telephony/twilio-websockets [2] - https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat-flows/ https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat-flows/ [3] - https://github.com/pipecat-ai/smart-turn https://github.com/pipecat-ai/smart-turn Disclaimer: I spend a lot of my time working on Pipecat. Also writing about both voice AI in general and Pipecat in particular. For example: https://voiceaiandvoiceagents.com/ https://voiceaiandvoiceagents.com/
- nextworddev 9mo agoThis is good stuff. In your opinion, how close is Pipecat + OSS to replacing proprietary infra from Vapi, Retell, Sierra, etc?
- kwindla 9mo agoIt depends on what you mean by replacing. The integrated developer experience is much better on Vapi, etc. The goal of the Pipecat project is to provide state of the art building blocks if you want to control every part of the multimodal, realtime agent processing flow and tech stack. There are thousands of companies with Pipecat voice agents deployed at scale in production, including some of the world's largest e-commerce, financial services, and healthtech companies. The Smart Turn model benchmarks better than any of the proprietary turn detection models. Companies like Modal have great info about how to build agents with sub-second voice-to-voice latency.[1] Most of the next-generation video avatar companies are building on Pipecat.[2] NVIDIA built the ACE Controller robot operating system on Pipecat.[3] [1] https://modal.com/blog/low-latency-voice-bot https://modal.com/blog/low-latency-voice-bot - [2] https://lemonslice.com/ https://lemonslice.com/ = [3] https://github.com/NVIDIA/ace-controller/ https://github.com/NVIDIA/ace-controller/
- aftbit 9mo agoThis opens up new possibilities for interactive phone services. Retro-futuristic for sure.
- wild_egg 9mo agoThe baseline configurations all note <2s and <3s times. I haven't tried any voice AI stuff yet but a 3s latency waiting on a reply seems rage inducing if you're actually trying to accomplish something. Is that really where SOTA is right now?
- wellthisisgreat 9mo agoNo, there are models with sub-second latency for sure
- coderintherye 9mo agoMicrosoft Foundry's realtime voice API (which itself is wrapping AI models from the major players) has response times in the milliseconds.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- duckkg5 9mo agoAbsolutely not. 500-1000ms is borderline acceptable. Sub-300ms is closer to SOTA. 2000ms or more means people will hang up.
- fragmede 9mo agoplay "Just a second, one moment please <sounds of typing>".wave as soon as input goes quiet. ChatGPT app has a audio version of the spinner icon when you ask it a question and it needs a second before answering.
- emil-lp 9mo agoAlternate between that and play "ehh".wav
- phantasmish 9mo agoI haaaaate the fake typing noises.
- eugene3306 9mo agoI've created Asterisk Codex Skill, but turns out there is ten seconds timeout for scripts
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- WD-42 9mo agoWhat is the application of this that makes anything better for anyone? All I can think of is more spammers, scammers, horrible customer support lines.
- anhner 9mo ago> What is the application of this? spammers, scammers and horrible customer support lines.
- asdfsfds 9mo ago[flagged]
- mcny 9mo agoIt is funny you mention Microsoft s customer support because it is a publicly known issue at this point that I'd you are a Microsoft employee or a v dash, the first level of support you talk to is basically something you have to overcome to get any help at all.
- dmos62 9mo agoGood customer support lines? Is there a reason why it can't provide good support. I often use chatgpt's voice function.
- TZubiri 9mo agoThe expectation of customer support lines is that customers want to speak to humans. It isn't just the fact that these are semantics that aren't written anywhere and are open to change, because by using a human-like voice agent on a customer support line, you are pretending that that is a human, which is a scam or fraud. If you really believe that the support can be good, then use a robotic text to speech, don't pretend it's a human. And make it clear to users that they are talking to a human, phone is a protocol that has the semantic that you speak to a human. Use something else. The bottom line is that you have clients that registered under the belief that they could call a phone number and speak to a human, businesses are performing a short-term switcheroo at the expense of their clients, it's a scam.
- kamma4434 9mo agoNice to see Asterisk on the home page of HN. It’s been a while… Even if the focus is now on hosted telephony, my experience is that everywhere you can hear the default nusic-on-hold
- louky 9mo agoI don't mind music-on-hold as much except when they break with a human voice at intervals saying inane things such as "your call is important to us. Thank you for holding" Which makes me think the call has been answered. If there's not actual call queue information, just play music so I can ignore it and continue working without that NOP interrupt.
- ale42 9mo agoI guess the comment was just about how much Asterisk deployments are out there because you can often hear its default music-on-hold? But maybe I'm wrong.
- jonway 9mo agothats funny, i interpreted this as "Hosted Asterisk People Sell a Default Experience" (and probably charge for custom messages) so its cool to see something different and marketable
- RockRobotRock 9mo agoLong shot, if anyone here is an Asterisk wizard. I would like to correlate CDRs to voicemail recording locations. I am building an integrated dashboard for call recordings, and want voicemails to be included, but that's been surprisingly difficult.
- parrotplatform 9mo agoSo, there is no straight forward way that I can think of. But, what I would do is set a channel variable and log it somewhere: exten => s,n,Set(VM_UNIQUEID=${UNIQUEID}) exten => s,n,VoiceMail(${EXTEN}@default) If you are using AGI or ARI, you can log it somewhere useful so you can correlate later. If you are using a more vanilla configuration I’d say use the voicemail metadata .txt file that will be in the same folder as the recording to get info to find the CDR. It has things like callerid, origmailbox, origdate (or maybe it’s origtime), and duration. origmailbox should match the CDR destination and the orig time should also match. Haven’t done this specifically. But, I’m hoping I’m pointing you in the right direction. I work with Freeswitch almost exclusively these days. But, my first experience with VoIP was Asterisk and a huge Perl AGI file keeping everyone talking to each other. Those were good time!
- RockRobotRock 9mo agoYou are awesome!
- Tikrong 9mo agoLooked at a repo and it seems this project was heavily AI generated. Would be interesting to hear from the author of the project how it was built.
- ghurtado 9mo ago> Looked at a repo and it seems this project was heavily AI generated That's the first thing that I noticed too. It's gotten to the point that my body subconsciously rejects bullet lists and headings that start with emojis.
- Tikrong 9mo agoYep, and the number of commits is insane. In early commits there are cursor rules and reports about task complexity made by AI. So it's really interesting, how was the project created.
- scsh 9mo agoIndependent of any feelings about the use of AI, I find that specific style of formatting to be extremely visually distracting and tend to click away because of that. Emoji, imo, are very information dense per character so it makes the rest of the info hard to parse.
- Tikrong 9mo agoWhen I see this style first thing that comes to mind is that the whole text was generated and maybe not even read by the author. And I am not yet confident to trust AI in writing the docs without supervision. So I have troubles in trusting the whole thing I see because of that.
- scsh 9mo agoThat's also a totally fair take!
- fennecbutt 9mo agoYes, developers on my teams have started submitting PRs exactly like this and the content of the PR is similar. Still need to figure out how to put a stop to it.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- matt3210 9mo agoI (and most people I ask) definitely don’t answer calls from robots or watch videos with robot voice. I’m not sure what value the customer gets here.
- hkjarral 9mo ago[dead]