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Dograh

an OSS Vapi alternative to quickly build and test voice agents

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Hi HN, I have been building voice agents for sometime now. I was earlier automating parts of visa processing, and we needed real-time, multilingual voice calling.I assumed the hard work was just wiring LiveKit/Pipecat + STT/TTS + an LLM. It wasn’t.Even with solid OSS (Pipecat/LiveKit), we still had to do a lot of plumbing- variable extraction, tracing, testing etc and any workflow changes required constant redeploys.We eventually realized we’d spent more time building infrastructure than building the actual agents. Everything felt custom. We hit every possible pain with Pipecat and VAPI style systems.So we built Dograh - a fully open-source voice agent framework that includes all the boring, painful pieces by default.What’s different:- Pipecat-based engine, but forked - custom event model, and concurrency fixes- One-click start template generated by an LLM Agent for a quick get start template for any use case- Drag-and-drop visual agent builder for quick iteration (the thing we wished existed earlier)- Variable extraction layer (name/order/date/etc.) baked into the LLM loop- Built in Telephony integration (Twilio/ Vonage/ Vobiz/ Cloudonix)- Multilingual support end-to-end- Select any LLM TTS STT (add their credits, if any)- AI-to-AI call testing: automatically stress-test an agent before shipping (still a work in progress- so patchy as of now)- Fully Open SourceIt's built and maintained by YC alumni / exit founders who got tired of rebuilding the same plumbing.Why we open-sourced it: We kept feeling that the space was drifting toward closed SaaS abstractions (VAPI, Retell). Those are good for demos, but once you need data controls, privacy or self/offline deployment, you end up stuck. We wanted a stack where you can see every part, fork it, self-host it, and patch it as needed.Try it:- Repo: https://github.com/dograh-hq/dograhThis spins up a basic multilingual agent with everything pre-wired.Who this is for:- If you are looking for self hosting a Vapi like platform for Data Privacy etc.- Anyone trying to build production-grade voice agents without reinventing audio plumbing.- If you’ve tried to glue STT→LLM→TTS manually, you probably know the exact pain this is built forHappy to answer technical questions, show the architecture, or hear how we can improve the product.

HN · launched Dec 8, 2025 · 16 upvotes (top 38%) · 0 views

Niche: ai voice agents and platforms · 197 launches, 20 in the last 7 days ▲ +25% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Agent / copilot
  • Developer
  • AI-native
  • Commercial product

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Could you build this?

Partial While standard WebRTC voice agents can be quickly scaffolded, building a reliable platform that handles telephony (SIP/PSTN), low-latency audio pipelines, barge-in, and agent evaluation requires non-trivial audio systems engineering.

What it would actually take: The system requires a distributed WebRTC/SIP telephony gateway (FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, or LiveKit SIP), orchestrating streaming pipelines between VAD (Silero), STT (Deepgram/Whisper), fast LLM inference, and streaming TTS (Cartesia/ElevenLabs). The hard engineering piece is sub-500ms voice turn-taking, acoustic echo cancellation, handling natural interruptions (barge-in), and packet-loss resilience over poor cellular connections.

Discussion

10 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Vapi, Retell, OpenAI Real Time API, Gemini Live, Qwen 3 Omni

Concerns raised: Latency vs reasoning tradeoff with larger models, High platform fees (60-70% of total spend), LLM inference lag from providers, Instruction following quality with smaller open-source models, Managing long-running conversations while keeping context tight and cost-effective

Feature requests: Different voice personas selector, Standardized way to extract variables from conversations, Faster workflow iteration without redeploying, AI-to-AI test loops

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 198 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #90 of 199 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 32 days after the earliest competitor.

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