When Replicant surveyed the market of voice API providers, they were looking for one thing: speed. The San Francisco company’s conversational AI technology creates authentic, natural, automated interactions with customers, without lag, latency, or interruption.
Watch the video interview with Replicant CTO and co-founder Benjamin Gleitzman and Telnyx Head of Customer Success Mark Morse to learn how Telnyx sits at the core of this technology:
Low-latency media access enables human-like conversational AI
To create a realistic conversational AI experience, Replicant demands consistently low “talk-time” latency (the time from when the user stops speaking to when the bot responds). They consider acceptable latency one second or less.
But achieving this low latency was a challenge, as most providers could only reduce latency to three seconds. Other AI platforms mask this kind of delayed response with “human” noises (e.g., typing sounds or audible “um” sounds), but Replicant wanted to be honest and upfront with their customers.
“People notice when you’re trying to cover up latency, and the call turns into a sluggish lecture instead of a conversation,” said Gleitzman.
“It’s very important that we’re genuine and honest with our customers. It’s one of the reasons we focus on latency and engineer our systems to save every millisecond we can. Because we’re able to get latency down to the level we want with Telnyx, we don’t have to bend the truth with our customers like some of our competitors.”
Replicant has seen a huge speed boost since switching to Telnyx, cutting talk-time latency from more than three seconds to under one second. Replicant leverages the high-speed Telnyx Programmable Voice API for real-time media packet access and Virtual Cross Connects link their cloud infrastructure directly to Telnyx's multi-cloud network.
“We did a survey of the scene, and, in many cases, Telnyx was the fastest provider that was there on the market,” said Gleitzman.
Carrier-grade quality provides high availability and peace of mind
In providing mission-critical contact center technology to their customers, Replicant can’t afford downtime or call audio issues. With Telnyx, reliability worries are a thing of the past.
Replicant recently raised $27M in Series A financing and serves a growing base of enterprise customers.
With this growth, Gleitzman says, “our demands for an always-on, reliable service have increased.”
The company sought a provider with a global, redundant network to ensure this always-on service.
“I’m impressed with the steps Telnyx has taken to ensure we never go down,” said Gleiztman. “In places where there’s really no way to mitigate without switching over to another region or another data center, Telnyx has created that ability for us.”
Easy scalability enables rapid deployment and growth
As a fast-growing software company, Replicant sought a telephony partner who could keep pace with their development cycles and accelerate their onboarding of new customers.
“Replicant can be on the phone now, and taking 100% of call center traffic in days—not weeks or months, which may happen with other players who are out there on the market,” said Gleiztman, citing continuous improvements to the Telnyx telephony engine alongside improvements to the company’s AI models as core drivers of this rapid onboarding ability.
“We’ve ramped from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of calls per day with customers without experiencing any issues from Telnyx. It’s been seamless.”
Flexible Voice APIs and AI combine for the contact center of the future
More than just delivering low-latency chatbots, Replicant has ambitions to revolutionize an entire industry. In Gleiztman’s words, “Replicant powers the world’s first autonomous contact center.”
This bold claim speaks to a dramatic shift in how the world thinks about contact center solutions, especially as the COVID-19 crisis placed unprecedented demands on contact centers across the globe.
“I think everyone took a really hard look at their business as things were beginning to shut down. I believe our technology, in partnership with Telnyx as a telephony provider, is exactly what today’s unpredictable world needs. We’re giving companies the ability to deliver elastic capacity, address shifting customer demand, scale-up, scale-down, and, not only handle but actually fully triage, support and answer call flows, so you get an always-on customer service.”
Cost savings matter, especially at scale
With every business decision, price is an important factor. By switching to Telnyx, Replicant reduced voice costs from $0.07 to $0.01 per minute—that’s an 86% cost reduction. The substantial difference means Replicant can offer more competitive pricing and scale efficiently without having to worry about spiraling costs.
Looking for high-speed programmable voice to power your conversational AI? Check out our developer docs or talk to a member of our team today.
