Last week, OpenAI finally launched the anticipated Voice mode, and one thing stood out: its cost.
The Realtime API uses both text tokens and audio tokens.
Text input tokens are priced at $5 per 1M and $20 per 1M output tokens. Audio input is priced at $100 per 1M tokens and output is $200 per 1M tokens.
This equates to approximately $0.06 per minute of audio input and $0.24 per minute of audio output.
This translates to $0.15 per minute. It’s arguably quite expensive and higher than expected, leaving many wondering how it compares to the cost of human agents.
This pricing is less expensive than the hourly rate of human agents in the U.S. and U.K., but 2x the cost of human agents in the Philippines and 5x the cost of those in India.
What does this mean for customer support?
There’s been a lot of talk about what Voice mode means for the industry.
There are two main opinions on its impact:
Bot enthusiasts: People who boast AI bots will very soon completely replace human agents. Likely affiliated with voice bot companies.
Traditionalists: Legacy thinkers who are skeptical of AI’s potential to replace agents due to the complexity of the industry and technology’s immaturity.
The truth, as almost always, falls somewhere in the middle—AI will eventually disrupt the industry entirely, however it will take way more time.
Let’s get some things straight
The contact center industry is huge and complex
Major changes will not happen overnight
Customer acceptance will be the ultimate driver in bot deployment and adoption
Millions of people losing jobs is a major political problem. If the process starts to get regulated, it may take much longer.
Voice Bots: Pros and Cons
Pros
The price of Voice AI will go down by 2-3x in a year
Voice bots will cover more and more use cases
Much easier to manage bots than people
Bots work 24/7, without breaks and don’t get tired
No paying overtime
Speaks multiple languages
No onboarding and training
Easy to scale.
Cons:
AI hallucinates and, until this is solved, AI won’t be trusted
Hallucination errors add up and compound when multiple agentic flows are bound together
Large integration cost with legacy systems
Where Humans Outperform
Show empathy, read between the lines, and connect with customers
Have intuition, can adapt, and are better at handling complex or sensitive issues
Create trust and rapport with customers
What happens next?
Few things should happen for the adoption of Bots to accelerate
Must stop hallucinating
Reasoning must get better
The price must go down
Must have more integrations into enterprise systems and tooling
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Why would you not compare this to existing voice ai solutions in terms or pricing? It’s also not really better than the existing solutions.