Your voice AI will cost less than you think. Or more. Find out in 3 minutes.
Select STT, TTS, and LLM providers
Models real-world voice AI pipeline costs by combining speech-to-text, LLM processing, and text-to-speech pricing from 38+ providers. The calculator factors in context window growth during multi-turn conversations, which is the primary hidden cost most teams miss.
A typical 5-minute customer service call costs $0.08–$0.35 depending on provider choices. STT runs $0.01–$0.04/min, LLM processing $0.02–$0.15/call (grows with conversation length), and TTS $0.01–$0.06/min. At scale, the LLM is usually the largest cost.
For STT, Deepgram and AssemblyAI offer strong accuracy at competitive prices. For TTS, ElevenLabs leads on naturalness but costs more - Cartesia and PlayHT are strong alternatives. For LLM processing, GPT-4o-mini and Claude Haiku handle most conversational tasks at a fraction of frontier model costs.
Under 800ms total round-trip feels conversational. Break that into ~200ms STT, ~300ms LLM, ~200ms TTS, and ~100ms network. Streaming responses from all three components is critical - waiting for complete responses before starting the next stage adds seconds.