Transcript
00:00:00you just built a voice ai agent it works then the bill shows up and you're paying for the llm the
00:00:05voice the phone call and then another platform fee on top of that that's not even the worst part
00:00:10the worst part you still don't really even own the system today i'll show you dogra
00:00:16and an open source vappy alternative you can self-host inspect and control
00:00:26voice ai nowadays can look somewhat simple from the outside take a phone call turn speech into text
00:00:33send it to the llm turn the answer back into speech it's done that's easy right well as any of us know
00:00:39who've tried this not really because real calls are messy people interrupt people go silent they're
00:00:46going to change topics they can ask really weird questions your agent needs to call apis and when
00:00:53it breaks you need to know why that is where most voice ai projects become more of a pain a voice
00:00:59agent is not just chat gpt with a phone number it is a live system with a bunch of moving parts right
00:01:06that's speech to text llm text to speech state tool calls a boatload of other things you get it there's
00:01:12a lot of moving parts that we don't actually see happening and when the call fails the bot gave a
00:01:17bad answer is not enough was it the prompt was it the model what was it why did it fail and this is
00:01:23where dogra comes in if you enjoy coding tools that speed up your workflow be sure to subscribe we have
00:01:29videos coming out all the time all right now let's look at this in practice i'm going to start locally
00:01:34because if a tool says it's built for devs i want to see docker before anything else this was super easy
00:01:39to spin up i'm going to clone it from github i'm going to cd into the folder and then i just have
00:01:44to run docker compose up that's simple enough easy enough for us once the containers are running we
00:01:50can jump into the dogra ui now i'll build a simple lead qualification agent so what do i mean by that
00:01:57someone's going to call in the agent asks what they want to build then it asks about the company the
00:02:03size the budget small things like this it'll then call an api tool to create or update a crm lead if
00:02:11we embed that and maybe i could even say if the lead was qualified it transfers to a human so i add a
00:02:18prompt node then a qualification step then an api tool call and then i can add a branch and a transfer
00:02:28there's no custom orchestration code yet and that's kind of the point here
00:02:32this looks like a no code canvas but for devs and the value is not no code the value is not wasting
00:02:39code trying to tie everything together now let's try to run a test call here hi this is sarah from
00:02:46inbound calls are you still there we're looking for an ai phone agent for inbound demo requests that's
00:02:55great i can definitely help you with that to make sure i connect you with the right solution could
00:03:00you tell me a little more about what you're looking to achieve with an ai phone agent for your inbound
00:03:05demo requests let's say around 20 000 minutes thanks for sharing that and what is your company
00:03:11size and industry now we can see the transcript here we can see the trace we can see the tool call
00:03:18that actually happened and we can see the state changes plus here's the recording which i wanted in
00:03:24the first place and that is what i want as a dev not just the bot worked i want to know why it worked
00:03:31when it fails i want evidence of this actually happening so what is dogra dogra appears to give
00:03:37us three different things out of all this we get a voice agent a visual workflow builder in the platform
00:03:44layer you usually have to build yourself the voice engine is the part that connects the caller the phone
00:03:50provider speech to text the llm and text to speech that is what makes the call actually happen the
00:03:57workflow builder is where you design the logic of this whole system so instead of hard coding every
00:04:03prompt branch api call and transfer you can map out the flow visually so huge win here i like these kind
00:04:09of maps ask this question wait for the answer that's kind of what we're mapping out here i can call this
00:04:15api branch here transfer there that kind of logic should be easy to change then to all this there's
00:04:21the platform layer testing tracing recordings analytics that is the boring stuff every series voice project
00:04:28eventually needs with all this you can bring your own providers your own llm and your own tts
00:04:34because dogra is open source you can inspect the code change how it works and self-host it as of this recording
00:04:41github stars are low so this is a super new find that i found but it's honestly a rather cool one
00:04:47now let's compare dogra to other things we already have out here you have three main ways to build
00:04:51voice agents first is hosted platforms vappy bland retail these are good when you want to move fast and
00:04:58you don't want to run infrastructure you get clean dashboards apis transcript testing tools all that's
00:05:04really useful but you start to lose control right there if the platform changes pricings you deal with
00:05:10it if the platform changes limits deal with it right if you need custom deployment anything like that
00:05:17again you might hit a wall hosted tools are fast though so i guess that's a win you have some of these
00:05:23raw frameworks like uh i came across pipe cap though code a live kit i think is one of them
00:05:30these give you a lot more control you can build almost anything but now you're building everything
00:05:36around this framework off ui workflow editor so that's a big trade-off using things like that
00:05:42now dogra is still way too new but it's here and i think their bet is kind of simple what if you could
00:05:49use a visual voice agent builder without giving up the self-hosting choosing a provider tracing and
00:05:56control that's what this appears to be write code where code matters use the builder where your flow
00:06:02matters inspect the runtime when things break and swap providers when costs change self-hosting gives
00:06:09us a lot of control which is huge vappy bland retail are best for fast hosted deployment but the trade-off
00:06:16cost locking and less control if you enjoy coding tools like this be sure to subscribe to the better
00:06:22stack channel we'll see you in another video
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