Calendar apps are important for productiveness however it’s onerous to distinguish sufficient to have sustained development from simply the core utilization. Y Combinator-backed Superpowered, which is an AI-powered notetaker in your conferences that doesn’t contain recording bots, hit this roadblock and is now pivoting to develop into Vapi, an API supplier so anybody can simply create a natural-sounding voice-based AI-powered assistant.
Superpowered was based in 2020 by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta. However after three years of engaged on it, Dearsley stated the crew needed to work on the more difficult product. The corporate is just not shutting down the preliminary product because the startup stated that Superpowered is worthwhile — it’s within the means of bringing somebody in to run it. Y Combinator stated in June that greater than 10,000 individuals have been utilizing the product weekly, however the firm didn’t present any up to date numbers.
Picture Credit: Vapi
Thus far, Superpowered/Vapi has raised $2.1 in seed cash from traders together with Kleiner Perkins and Summary Ventures.
Pivot to Vapi
The corporate provides Vapi as an API to let builders create a bot utilizing simply prompts — it then put it behind a telephone quantity. Moreover, it provides an SDK integration so builders can embed the bot on web sites and cell apps.
Dearsley instructed TechCrunch over electronic mail that the concept to construct Vapi stemmed from a private drawback. He had moved to San Fransisco and began lacking his family and friends, who have been in a special time zone. He constructed an AI bot hooked up to a telephone quantity on the opposite finish to speak to somebody with a purpose to type his ideas.
“I appreciated it, however I used to be frequently pissed off with how unnatural it was. It wasn’t like speaking to an individual. The voice sounded off, there could be lengthy delays earlier than it responded, and it might interrupt me whereas I used to be talking.” he stated.
“So I saved engaged on it and going for my walks with it. Finally, we obtained fascinated with this dialog drawback. It’s actually onerous to make one thing really feel human. Voice assistants immediately are clunky and turn-based, we need to construct one thing that feels human.”
Technically, Vapi is at the moment stringing a bunch of third-party APIs to construct a strong voice dialog platform. For example, it makes use of options from Twilio for telephony, Deepgram for transcription, Each day for audio streaming, OpenAI for responses, and PlayHT for text-to-speech.
ScaleConvo, a startup within the YC winter batch for 2024, is already utilizing Vapi to launch conversational bots for gross sales groups and property administration corporations. Nevertheless, Vapi didn’t disclose its different purchasers. The corporate is opening up its API with Vapi Cellphone and Vapi Internet merchandise immediately.
Challenges for Vapi
One of many greatest challenges the startup has is to scale back latency, in accordance with Magnus Revan, an ex-Gartner analyst and chief product officer at multimodal dialog startup Openstream.ai.
“OpenAI fashions want between 2-10 seconds to generate a solution – whereas on the telephone the gold commonplace is to have 700ms between the person ending speaking after which the ‘bot’ beginning to discuss. And attending to sub 1-second latency with succesful fashions (excessive parameter rely open-source fashions like LLaMA2 70B) is admittedly onerous,” Revan stated.
At present, Vapi has a latency of 1.2-2 seconds relying on varied elements. Dearsley expects to deliver down latency to below one second within the subsequent month because of Vapi’s personal work and OpenAI’s enhancements.
Mohamed Musbah, an angel investor in Vapi additionally stated that the startup’s resolution will enhance with total advances in API.
“As OpenAI and others enhance their fashions, Vapi’s platform will develop into extra highly effective, outfitted with higher information bases, code execution capabilities, and bigger context home windows. Vapi’s deal with fixing the best friction areas in voice communication will probably be its edge as person demand grows for voice assistants,” he stated.
Nevertheless, this places the onus on the advance of different options fairly than Vapi itself. Dearsley stated that reliance on different APIs reduces Vapi’s defensibility if massive corporations begin shifting into that space. Nevertheless, the crew stated that it has an edge by way of having constructed infrastructure to deal with 1000’s of calls concurrently. Dearsley emphasised that with Vapi’s internet and telephone API launch for the general public, the crew can even look to construct its personal fashions for audio-to-audio options.