Airtel IQ vs LiveKit Agents

Airtel IQ combines voice, SMS, and WhatsApp communications through web and API access. Its WhatsApp Business APIs support lead generation, customer support, bill payment, and orders or transactions. Businesses can run customized campaigns, personalized ad creatives, and cart-abandonment campaigns, while chats can move between bots and live agents with rich media. The service describes UPI payments in WhatsApp, ONDC merchant onboarding, WhatsApp order management, and a plugin that works with any POS system for digital invoicing. Messaging includes verified business profiles, delivery and read receipts, two-way conversations, end-to-end encryption, and automatic fallback among SMS, WhatsApp, and voice. Airtel states support for 250 WhatsApp transactions per second and access to more than 60 solution partners. Cloud Telephony adds a unique business number, click to call, IVR, outbound dialing, caller-ID options, toll-free calling, and number masking. Airtel IQ also supports embedded communications and programmable voice, messaging, and video.

LiveKit Agents is an open source framework and cloud platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents. Python or Node.js programs can join LiveKit rooms as realtime participants, and deployments can run on LiveKit Cloud or a developer-chosen environment. Agents can process realtime voice, video, and text input and produce output in any modality. The framework supports LLM tool use, frontend RPC calls, multi-agent handoffs, and connections to phone systems through native SIP. LiveKit Inference provides models from providers including OpenAI, Google, AssemblyAI, Deepgram, Cartesia, and ElevenLabs; open source plugins connect to other providers. LiveKit Cloud includes agent insights such as session replay, transcripts, trace spans, logs, and reports. The free Build plan includes 1,000 agent session minutes, five concurrent sessions, and one deployment. Ship starts at $50 a month and includes 5,000 minutes, then $0.01. LiveKit says prompts, audio, and completions handled by LiveKit Inference and its model providers are not logged or retained. It lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA / CPRA, and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework; PCI DSS and ISO 27001 are in progress.