Fair point on the title - should have been clearer. Dograh is an open source alternative to Vapi , not a clone though. Vapi/Retell are closed platforms; this is open source infra you self-host and modify. Like saying n8n is a clone of Zapier because they solve the same problem.
Great writeup. The speaking vs listening framing is underrated. TTFT with Groq and colocation are both real wins that don't get talked about enough.
For anyone wanting this production ready out of the box, Dograh is an OSS project built on the same principles and goes much beyond ( https://github.com/dograh-hq/dograh ).
Groq, Flux(Deepgram), instant barge-in cancel, full streaming pipeline etc .but also telephony, echo handling, tool calls for external services, variable extraction, and domain dictionary baked in. All the parts needed in production are already solved.
Hey HN,
sometime back someone on HN asked for an open-source alternative for Vapi or Retell and we replied there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45884165)
That thread just confirmed otehrs running into the same problems we had been dealing with. Now Dograh is more mature.
We are happy to share some technical details for anyone interested.
A lot of Dograh’s internal work went into extending the functionality of the pipeline by including custom Frames and Processors, creating a ReactFlow based visual agent builder and creating an Engine that can parse that Agent JSON and call conversational LLM loops with function calling. Also we enhanced the functionality by creating easier access to extracted variables, call transcripts and recordings - things that are needed in any production deployment.
One thing we are still trying to understand better: how teams handle long-running conversations while keeping context tight and cheap. Would love to hear how others have approached that.
Hey we built dograh for exactly this - FOSS workflow builder for voice agents
https://github.com/dograh-hq/dograh
Ping us on slack if you want to discuss anything
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