NEW AI Agent

[krzykat]

First an apology for being AWOL for quite a while now. I've been so busy with growing out our Phone/MSP business along with getting my realtor's license that I've neglected my friends here. I promise to do better and start contributing again.

ANYHOW ... I was speaking with a friend's son who we chat about AI and he and another say they've got conversational AI working and we're supposed to meet on what it can do and what their next steps should be. Coincidentally I received an email from Fiverr about AI along with a demo-link about using it from a company called Retell AI. Has anyone ever used anything like this and integrated it in with asterisk, and if so, what have your results been?

The demo was pretty damn good.

 

[krzykat]

Oh - of course I figured how much is OSS - found this: https://github.com/RetellAI

 

[kenn10]

@krzykat welcome back! I thought you had ditched telecom to become a house flipper.

VitalPBX has introduced an AI auto attendant on their system. I played around with it but it seems really slow. It would be nice to have an OSS AI agent that was fast and fairly accurate to handle basic operator type functions and IVR functions. So far, I haven't found anything that works better than typical natural voice recognition systems utilized by most large companies. I'll check out your demo links to see what I can break.

 

[Samot]

I've been so busy with growing out our Phone/MSP business

Yeah a lot of compliance due dates coming soon. It's been busy on my side as well.

 

[kenn10]

AI along with a demo-link about using it from a company called Retell AI.

That is very impressive if it works as well as the demo. I tried the hotel, the dentist office and the restaurant. I threw things at them like "I don't give out my phone number or email address" and another instance I said I wanted a hotel room above the fifth floor. The AI was fast, responsive and never asked me to repeat anything. I'm shocked at how well that works.

I'm not going to have enough expertise to try the open source version but I can see the product has real potential.

 

[krzykat]

Yeah, I tried to break it as well with things such as "What insurance companies do you use" - "How about this company" - or things like Schedule an appointment outside of office hours. OSS would be nice, but you need to figure out at what point it makes sense. When you can buy something for your office that costs pennies, but you don't have much volume, what difference does it make? I'm almost thinking you do something and pay for it, and then if that bill gets large enough, you look at alternatives.

That being aid, I used to host all of our own servers, but then went to Vultr and DigitalOcean. After building up 100 servers on there, you'd think - OK - its now worthwhile to host yourself, but the safety net and stronger infrastructure makes it STILL a hard move. I'm just keeping them there, so afraid the same would be with AI receptionist.

 

[Dempan]

Yeah, I tried to break it as well with things such as "What insurance companies do you use" - "How about this company" - or things like Schedule an appointment outside of office hours. OSS would be nice, but you need to figure out at what point it makes sense. When you can buy something for your office that costs pennies, but you don't have much volume, what difference does it make? I'm almost thinking you do something and pay for it, and then if that bill gets large enough, you look at alternatives.

That being aid, I used to host all of our own servers, but then went to Vultr and DigitalOcean. After building up 100 servers on there, you'd think - OK - its now worthwhile to host yourself, but the safety net and stronger infrastructure makes it STILL a hard move. I'm just keeping them there, so afraid the same would be with AI receptionist.






I think the same logic applies to a lot of AI tools. For smaller use cases, managed services often win because you’re paying for reliability and convenience, not just the technology itself. Even with simpler AI applications, like creating professional profile images, many people prefer a ready-to-use ai headshot app instead of setting up and maintaining their own workflows.

I think this is a really practical way to look at it. There’s often a point where the cost of owning and maintaining something yourself is higher than just paying for a service that already works.

The server example is a good comparison. On paper, hosting 100 servers yourself might seem like the logical next step, but then you have to factor in uptime, hardware failures, security, backups, monitoring, and the time spent maintaining everything. The infrastructure providers are basically selling peace of mind as much as they are selling compute.

I think AI receptionists will probably follow the same path. For a small office with limited call volume, a managed solution can make a lot of sense because the alternative is spending time building, testing, and maintaining something that may not provide much additional value. Once usage gets high enough or the requirements become very specific, then it starts making sense to consider self-hosting or OSS options.

 

[wardmundy]

I tested RetellAI with the Nerd Vittles site, and there's a major issue using it as a knowledge base because it only extracts data up until June 2024 which is pretty much worthless for information in the VoIP world. Other than that, it's impressive. But it would get pricey very quickly. Doctors would probably love it.