Agent Voice Response vs VoiceGuide

Agent Voice Response is a self-hosted system that turns an Asterisk PBX into a real-time voice AI agent. Callers can interrupt while it speaks through voice-activity detection. Its composable microservices let operators swap automatic speech recognition, language-model, and text-to-speech engines. It supports Asterisk AudioSocket on Asterisk 18 and later, including named systems such as FreePBX, VitalPBX, Vicidial, Elastix, and custom dialplans. Listed integrations include OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Google, Ollama, Vosk, Kokoro, Ultravox, OpenRouter, CoquiTTS, and Silero. Noise cancellation and echo suppression are described before audio reaches the model. Local deployments can use Vosk or Silero, Ollama, and CoquiTTS or Kokoro, keeping caller audio on the network according to the maker. Docker microservices can scale horizontally behind a load balancer. AVR is free for personal and commercial use, with no license keys or per-minute charge. Setup requires Docker images, provider configuration, and an Asterisk dialplan extension.

VoiceGuide builds inbound and outbound IVR and messaging systems through a graphical callflow designer. It can run on-premise or in the cloud and works with Cisco, Avaya, and other telephony systems and providers. The outbound dialer supports standard, preview, and predictive dialing for ACD systems, with answering-machine detection, Do Not Call lists, scheduling, retries, and escalations. ACD features include queuing, skill-based routing, queue-position notifications, and callback scheduling. Interfaces include REST, WCF, COM, database, and file connections, plus JavaScript and VBScript inside callflows. Speech options listed include SAPI, Google Cloud, and MRCPv2 text-to-speech, along with Google Cloud Speech-to-Text/ASR and MRCPv2. It runs on Windows and supports API and self-hosted deployment. Pricing is paid, with one-time plans from $180. A free evaluation enables Enterprise+Dialer features for up to 30 simultaneous calls.