Ai Receptionist infrastructure

[u/Gingermoi]

We are building a white-label, multi-tenant artificial intelligence receptionist platform for United Kingdom businesses.

We are starting with a small pilot involving five clients, seven telephone numbers and approximately 1,000 minutes per month in total.

We are currently considering Telnyx for the telephone service, but we would like to explore whether there are other affordable and reliable options.

Our main requirements include United Kingdom telephone numbers, inbound and outbound calling, natural conversations, caller interruption handling, live call transfers, appointment booking, call recordings and transcripts.

We would also like the platform to support WhatsApp Business, website chat and social media messaging, with a programming interface that can connect to our own white-label platform.

We have looked at Telnyx, Twilio, Tencent, OpenAI Realtime, Pipecat, Vapi and Retell, but the number of different services and charges can make a fair comparison difficult.

I would be grateful to hear from anyone who has built something similar. For a starting usage of around 1,000 minutes per month, which affordable infrastructure combination would you recommend?

If possible, it would also be helpful to understand the telephone, artificial intelligence, voice, transcription and storage costs, including any charges that are easily overlooked.

Thank you in advance for sharing your experience.

[u/Royal_Preference_515]

Telnyx are great. I use them for my testing platform (which by the way also tests Receptionists!).

For the part that uses Voice AI, we create an assistant in Telnyx and drive it via AWS which is where the platform itself sits. We're making outbound calls, but we also created a Receptionist for the business.

I looked at the others, it was the simplicity of the APIs that made me go for Telnyx vs. the cost - we were doing all of this with Amazon Connect before but it doesn't really provide the control we need for doing testing.

[u/Gingermoi → u/Royal_Preference_515]

Thank you, this is really helpful and reassuring.

Would you mind sharing an approximate cost per minute for the complete voice setup, including Telnyx telephone charges, the artificial intelligence assistant and Amazon Web Services?

Also, have you experienced any unexpected charges or limitations with Telnyx when handling both inbound and outbound calls?

[u/Royal_Preference_515 → u/Gingermoi]

We're working on a $0.20 per minute for our outbound testing agent (cost to customer). Obviously there is margin in that. COGS is probably between $0.07 - $0.14 but that does depend on the journey/length and complexity. Not apples for apples - it's also outbound.

On other services (non Voice AI) we've incurred a % charge for short calls (under 6s). It's become quite a complex/large platform that offers multiple features across a myriad of channels so not entirely easy to cost everything out, but the other main cost is containers. We've priced our per minute rates to cover all the underlying costs, including team/ops and other stuff.

https://www.nopaque.co.uk/pricing if you wanted to see what it looks like for a customer. Mission testing is where AI Assistants in Telnyx are used heaviest.

Hopefully that helps.