Vogent helps you build Voice AI agents, fast
I always like to see what's coming out of Y-Combinator and here's one that caught my attention this week: Vogent:
Vogent is an all-in-one platform for building voice agents by using intelligent building blocks, including drag-and-drop conversational flow builders, IVR detection models, spelling-optimized voices, custom phone-ready LLMs, and more. Vogent is made for developers and no-code users alike.
Here's a quick overview of how it works:
What's particularly compelling is Vogent's real-world validation - the team there has spent a year implementing their technology with major players across healthcare, travel, and insurance sectors. So this isn't just theoretical innovation; it's battle-tested in high-volume, mission-critical environments.
I think quite a few readers might respond to this paragraph from the team:
While the core voice agent cycle (STT-LLM-TTS-VAD) is a mostly solved problem at this point, the last-mile problem for making these agents performant was frustrating. We ended up building a lot of band-aids, and we decided to consolidate all of the tools that we used to build these agents into a self-serve platform for developers and non-developers alike.
The Vogent team had to do the hard work anyway – so they've built it out as a service for anyone who'd like to use it. You can drive the platform in a variety of developer-friendly approaches including GraphQL, REST APIs, Javascript and there's a mobile SDK coming.
Pricing is really simple – just $0.09 per minute. Nothing else.
So I logged in to try it out...
Above, you can see me setting up Ewan's Agent really quickly. It was just a few clicks to get to this stage. I selected a generic voice, but I was tempted to upgrade to a premium voice!
Then I started with a very simple "make a booking" use case. This simply queries a default calendar API and returns answers for the Vogent ("voice agent").
And here is the knowledge base - you can easily upload document to help populate it and then do a quick query to check the results.
Book an appointment with my agent!
I was giving a lot of of thought to simply deploying my own agent with Vogent – it is soooo simple.
Granted you do need a bit of technical experience to get things running and right now, Vogent's user interface is pretty sparse. That will change, no doubt.
I reckon that within about 20 minutes, I could probably make it so you can call 'Ewan's agent' and book a meeting with me.
I already have everything exposed via cal.com (http://www.cal.com/ewanmacleod) so it's quite straight-forward to connect this to something like Vogent. Or simply make my own Google Calendar API-query capability with Loveable or code with Cursor/ChatGPT et al.
By default there was a 'get availabilities' function already setup because I'd clicked on the simple clinic appointment booking template. But it's simplicity to add a new function thus:
Next steps
It's fascinating looking at the pace of speed in the Conversational AI marketplace today. Within 5 minutes I had clicked about and got my agent setup. I reckon, as I say, I could probably have a Ewan agent that you can phone to book appointments with me deployed in under an hour.
Most of that time will spent fiddling about with the connectivity piece and then drawing out the call flow on the Vogent canvas. I also wasn't quite sure how to configure a live phone number to redirect to my Vogent yet. I'd need to click about the console to figure that out I think.
I didn't read the manual
I should probably go and read the docs to figure it out.
Oh wait. It's all here in Quickstart. Ok, so I stand corrected.
Ok, 20 seconds later, I now have a +1 515 number added. (They also have UK numbers, but you have to buy them, it seems).
With the number setup, I then used the 'make a call' system to test out my little agent – I did so using the web:
It was super crazy good.
Ridiculously good.
Astonishingly good.
Have a play
I would encourage you to have a play with Vogent - I found $5.00 of credit in my account waiting when I logged in first time, so I'd imagine it will be the same for you.
I strongly recommend having a play. See what you can do with it. Give it to your techies and see what they can make. By the end of the day, they'll have the first version operational, I'm sure.
Very impressive, team Vogent.
If you're looking to connect Vogent, here is Jagath (Co-Founder) on LinkedIn:
Jagath V.
And here is Co-Founder Vignesh:
And here is the go to market lead, Justin:
Justin Ratcliff
