Tools / Plivo / Plivo vs Telnyx
Voice AI agents and communications APIs with per-minute pricing.
Plivo is a communications API platform whose homepage now leads with voice AI agents. You can build agents two ways: with code — SDKs for Python, Node, and Go, a REST API, and a CLI, with documented paths for bringing LiveKit or Pipecat agents onto Plivo — or with a no-code Agent Studio where you describe the agent in plain English and deploy from templates. Under both sits Plivo's telephony layer: self-serve SIP trunking, bidirectional audio streaming with noise cancellation, and phone numbers across 150+ countries. Alongside voice, the platform covers SMS, WhatsApp, and chat. The site lists example use cases such as sales lead qualification, order tracking, payment collection, feedback surveys, and identity verification, and includes a recorded demo call in which an agent reschedules a dental appointment and texts a confirmation. Stated figures: under 500 ms voice latency, 99.99% platform uptime, and 50+ languages supported. Customer logos displayed on the homepage include Meta, Uber, Discord, GoDaddy, and DocuSign.
Inference, voice, and messaging APIs from a licensed carrier that owns its network, edge compute, and GPUs.
Telnyx is a licensed carrier that operates its own private global backbone, edge compute, and GPUs. Its homepage now leads with "infrastructure for real-time agents": an OpenAI-compatible inference platform for open-weight models, offered alongside the voice, storage, and wireless products on one control plane and one bill. The company is categorized here under communications APIs, and voice and messaging remain part of the product set — but inference is the headline now. The inference API works with your existing OpenAI SDK: you set the Telnyx base URL, API key, and model in your current client. Supported models stream responses, call tools, and return structured outputs. Serverless inference runs open-weight models on demand with usage-based pricing and no long-term commitments; dedicated inference and reserved GPU capacity cover open-source, custom, or fine-tuned models. Hosted models include GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3-Flash, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Kimi-K3 and Kimi-K2.6, MiniMax-M3-MXFP8, Qwen3.8-27B, Qwen3-Embedding-8B, and Gemma-4-26B-A4B-it. Around inference, Telnyx ships an edge runtime that runs containerized code at its points of presence: Functions for containerized apps, StatefulActor for entities whose state survives restarts, S3-compatible Object Storage, KV with TTLs, SQLDB (serverless SQLite), and CloudFS filesystem mounts. An Agent SDK adds persistent state, memory, scheduled tasks, and bindings to Telnyx's communications APIs. The company counts 50 such primitives on the single control plane. The site lists numbers and voice coverage in 140+ countries, 25+ points of presence on its private backbone, and real-time support for 100+ languages. Telnyx also publishes its own GLM-5.3 latency benchmark — 9.87s median full-response time versus 14.67s (Together), 20.61s (Fireworks), and 21.81s (Baseten) on an ~88.7k-input / 1,200-output-token workload — with the caveat on its own page that the results are specific to that model and test, not an SLA.