Vapi AI Review: Pros, Cons, & How It Works

Vapi AI lets you create your own voice agents that can execute tasks on the phone. These include automating inbound and outbound communication between your team and customers. However, the pricing model can be confusing and it’s not ideal for beginners. 

Read on to learn more about:

• What Vapi is and how it works
• Pros and cons of Vapi
• Vapi’s pricing structure
• Is it worth the investment? 
• And how Lindy.ai compares 

Let’s now discuss what Vapi is and some of its main features. 

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What is Vapi AI?

Vapi AI is a platform for creating voice-enabled assistants that handle phone calls with minimal human intervention.

With Vapi, you can build and deploy AI phone agents to answer or make calls. They use a knowledge base about your business or products to provide informed responses in real-time. 

Vapi’s agents actually sound pretty good too. They can mimic human tone and cadence, respond quickly, and understand everything the customer is saying.

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What can Vapi AI do?

Vapi is a powerful platform that can take over most phone operations and procedures. Here’s how Vapi can help your business:

• Rapidly develop and deploy customer service voice assistants: You can build, test, and deploy voice AI agents that sound, dare I say, better than most bored customer support agents. Vapi provides an intuitive building interface for creating your own customer support agents.

• HIPAA and SOC 2 Type 2 appointment scheduling: If you’re a medical practice, you can dedicate a phone number to scheduling, which your AI agents will operate. Clients will call, set up appointments, and even get answers to questions. Then, your agents can store the info in your scheduling calendar for easy access. 

• Cold calling for leads: Prompt your voice assistant with a pre-made set of possible lead phone numbers. Your voice assistant will ask questions from your knowledge base to see if they qualify. Pass the ones who do to your team of human reps.  

• Market research: Make cold calls to learn more about how folks feel about specific products or services.  

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How does Vapi AI work?

Get started with Vapi by creating an account. Then, build your assistant from scratch, or get your building started quickly by starting from a pre-made template. You can configure your assistant by selecting a transcription provider, like Deepgram, to convert speech to text. 

Choose a language model, like ChatGPT to generate responses from the transcribed text. The final configuration step is to select a text-to-speech provider, like PlayHT, so your transcribed responses can be spoken.

These steps set up a pretty impressive human-sounding AI voice assistant who can comprehend your questions and statements. 

Your final step is setting up a knowledge base, which your assistant will reference to answer questions and provide feedback during calls. 

Creating your knowledge base is as simple as uploading a PDF or connecting files via API. We recommend adding your support documentation, FAQs, and even notes from your team so that it has as much relevant info to help your customers as possible. 

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The pros and cons of Vapi AI

Like everything in life, Vapi comes with tradeoffs — here’s a look at Vapi’s highlights and hangups:

Pros

✔ Straightforward deployment: With Vapi’s templates, design environment, and ability to connect a knowledge base, generating AI agents doesn’t take many steps. This is particularly useful if you are a small or medium-sized company and need to deploy a tool quickly. 

✔ Ecosystem: Vapi provides detailed and helpful documentation with step-by-step guides and videos to create voice agents, connect APIs, and much more. And you can connect with both users and the support team on the Discord server.  

✔ Multi-language support: Both of Vapi’s speech-to-text transcribers can translate into many languages — and several of the text-to-voice tools do as well. For instance, if you choose Microsoft’s Azure as your voice tool, you’ll get access to over 140 languages, which can help you serve customers worldwide. 

Cons

❌ Need for technical skills: While the drag-and-drop interface simplifies many tasks, individuals without experience in conversation design, Natural Language Processing, or foundational AI concepts might struggle. Additionally, executing other tasks like setting up multi-language support requires knowing how to write coding commands, as the 

❌ Confusing pricing: Although Vapi advertises pricing at $0.05/minute, other costs are involved. These include the costs to transcribe text, use the AI models, text-to-speech tools, and integrate with other apps like Twilio. All these can add up, resulting in hefty bills at the end of the month. 

❌ Limited functionality: If you’re looking for an all-in-one AI tool that does more than just make, receive, and record calls, you’ll need to look beyond Vapi. Vapi is essentially a call agent only — you won’t be able to use Vapi to organize your email, schedule meetings, or scrape a website for information. 

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Vapi AI core features

In addition to creating a human-sounding, rapidly responding, and knowledgeable AI voice assistant, Vapi offers the following functionalities:

• Vapi’s Flow Studio: This no-code drag-and-drop editor lets you build and manage interactive conversations without code. Add on different nodes representing conversation stages, prompts, or logic branches. This lets you visualize the AI-driven dialogue your customers will experience when they interface with your voice assistant. 

• A singular telephony platform: This tool lets you create and manage inbound and outbound voice-based automations directly within the platform. Just connect your existing phone numbers, provision new ones, or add on a web phone and deploy your AI voice assistant onto this simple platform, reducing cost and complexity.

• Natural language understanding: Vapi can interpret user speech accurately, including complex phrases, slang, or industry-specific jargon. This leads to more natural, fluid conversations and helps identify user intent, which can aid in providing high-quality customer care.  

• Analytics and insights: Vapi records your agent’s conversations and aggregates real-time and historical metrics. On analytics dashboards, you can view the number of calls handled, completion rates, average handling times, user satisfaction scores, and other key performance indicators. This can help you continually optimize your AI voice tool. 

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Vapi pricing overview

To understand Vapi’s pricing, you need to know that it’s not as straightforward as other AI platforms that rely on credits or a flat monthly fee. Vapi starts at $0.05/minute but also includes the following 4 elements:

1. Telephony price: These costs pertain to inbound and outbound phone calls facilitated through providers like Twilio or Vonage.

2. Voice price: This is the cost incurred by the AI voice provider that you select, such as Eleven Labs. 

3. Model price: The model price is the amount you pay for the AI LLM, such as Gemini or ChatGPT, which executes your voice AI’s thinking. 

4. Transcriber price: Transcribers, which are Deepgram or ChatGPT, convert your customer’s voice into text. 

Before starting, you can try Vapi’s useful free version, providing $10 worth of credit. This lets you immediately begin testing your AI voice agents so you can ensure they’re dialed in before you start making loads of phone calls.  

Vapi offers an enterprise plan for bigger companies. This plan offers priority 24/7 support via a Slack Channel, customized pricing, and other perks. For more information, you can contact the Vapi team directly through the website. 

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How Vapi compares to Lindy

Lindy is a leading AI platform that you use to streamline voice operations and accelerate productivity. Let’s look at how it compares to Vapi:

What Lindy and Vapi both offer

Lindy can do a lot of what Vapi can do, let’s cover that first: 

• You’ll be able to create voice agents and share a knowledge base with them so they can answer customer support, sales, or other questions

• Your voice agents can handle inbound and outbound calls to answer customer service questions, gather information, and more

• Lindy voice agents can also detect whenever a situation is too complex to solve on their own, and they’ll forward the call to a human agent.

• Lindy can speak in over 50 languages, allowing you to reach clients in several countries.

• Lindy has a robust ecosystem featuring the Lindy Academy, which will teach you everything you need to know to use the platform. 

What Lindy offers that Vapi doesn’t

Vapi is built for developers, and while it says you can get started without any coding, that’s a bit of a stretch. You’ll need to understand JSON and write a bit of Python to know what you’re doing. 

However, Lindy provides a more user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface designed with non-technical teams in mind. You won’t need to write any lines of code to create a Lindy voice agent.

Also, Vapi built for voice-based interactions, but it pretty much stops there. If you need end-to-end automation beyond phone calls — like updating CRMs, managing tasks, or triggering workflows — Lindy is the smarter choice.

Here are related agents you can build with Lindy that Vapi doesn’t offer: 

1. CRM auto-update agent

• Logs call summaries, transcriptions, and action items into an integrated CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.).
• Extracts key details like client names, call reasons, and follow-up tasks.

2. Call follow-up agent

• Sends personalized follow-up emails or Slack notifications.

3. Task management agent

• Creates to-do lists from call action items.
• Assigns tasks to the right team members and sets deadlines based on conversation context.

4. Sales pipeline assistant

• Score leads in the CRM after a sales call.
• Flags high-priority leads and suggests next actions.

5. Scheduling & meeting coordination agent

• Books follow-up calls and meetings based on voice AI insights.
• Integrates with Google Calendar and Outlook.

6. Compliance & documentation agent

• Ensures call summaries align with compliance standards.
• Organizes call logs for auditing and legal purposes.

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The Bottom Line: Is Vapi AI Worth it?

Vapi AI is indeed a powerful voice agent AI platform. It shines in delivering profound insights into sales conversations, helping you hone their sales tactics through gathering information and analytics, all while saving your time. 

However, only tech-savvy folks, who can write basic Python commands or understand JavaScript Object Notation, will be able to use most of the features. 

And, it’s not possible to automate related tasks like sending a custom follow-up email and try to up-sell the customer. You’ll need to sign up with (and pay for) another AI platform. 

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Build a free AI voice agent with Lindy today

Lindy's extensive automation features, affordability, and flexibility make it an attractive option for folks who want more than just voice AI. 

Whether you aim to optimize processes through email management, scrape data from various sources, or just need an intelligent tool to handle your hectic meeting schedule, Lindy has a lot to offer.

Want to try out Lindy’s phone agents to see how they compare to Vapi? Try Lindy for free today.