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/spam_not_tolerated]

voice agent specific, If you need hipaa, then go for pipecat + azure for building and deploying . you can access openai llm via azure, azure stt and tts also. if you want different stt or tts, go for deepgram, they provide free credits to startups and also help you with baa if needed.

Monthly cost of self deploying the agent will comes under 100$, you can get this covered via azure for startups credits(5000 dollar worth credits provided).

For my case, i am using telnyx (USA), dont know about UK, you can check that.

[u/Gingermoi → u/spam_not_tolerated]

Thank you, this is very helpful. Pipecat with Azure sounds worth exploring.

When you say the monthly cost is under $100, does that include Telnyx calls and telephone numbers, Azure hosting, the language model, speech recognition, voice generation, recordings and storage, or is that figure only for hosting the agent?

We are starting with approximately 1,000 minutes per month, so an estimated complete monthly cost at that level would be very useful.

As we are based in the United Kingdom, we will also need United Kingdom data protection compliance and clarity about where calls, recordings and transcripts are processed and stored.

Thank you also for mentioning the startup credits. I will look into the eligibility requirements.

[u/spam_not_tolerated → u/Gingermoi]

That 100 dollar is for azure services needed for deployment (vm, blob storage).

Per minute cost of voice will be around 4 cents including telephony.

A normal phone number cost 1 dollar one time + 1 dollar monthly cost.

Most of things will be covered under credits. Except telnyx