Software
Are you looking for a parloa alternative? If yes, this guide is for you.
Parloa is a platform that lets you build entity-level AI voice agents that are trained on the company’s specific terminologies and offer deep integrations with internal systems and multi-channel capability across phone systems, apps, websites, and smart devices.
The platform is designed to automate customer communications across multiple channels–including voice, email, and instant messaging—helping businesses reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction.
While parloa offers many features and integrations, the platform falls short on some key aspects of service quality, including slow deployments, long deployment cycles, high latency, and non-transparent pricing.
This kind of defeats the whole purpose of AI phone calling, doesn't it?
Thankfully, today, we're here to discuss incredible parloa alternatives that can help you take your AI-powered conversation to the next level.
In this guide, we'll examine the top parloa alternatives and compare their functionality, features, and overall performance.
Parloa positions itself as a platform for creating AI-voice agents to improve customer service. It promises to automate routine tasks such as scheduling customer appointments, addressing FAQs, managing sales calls, and more, all without human intervention. Sounds great, right?
Well, not quite right.
Despite its ambitious attempts, it struggles to meet user expectations. Here are some common issues its users have reportedly faced with Parloa-
Deployment in an AI voice agent refers to the extended time it takes to get an AI voice agent fully operational and available for use.
Users report that parloa requires several hours for initial setup, demanding meticulous configuration of conversation flows and integration guidelines. Many times the total deployment time can take 1–3 months or more, which is quite high compared to other tools.
Parloa also requires developer assistance for full implementation, as no-code options are limited to Zapier integrations.
Parloa offers custom pricing tailored to each business's specific needs and scale. Pricing depends on many factors, such as the size of the organization, integration complexity, and required services, making it suitable for startups as well as established enterprises.
Looks perfect, right? But it's actually now.
The process of determining a tailored price often involves lengthy discussions, legal agreements, and technical assessments, increasing the sales cycle and operational overhead.
Custom pricing also comes with high upfront costs and large initial investment, which is not an affordable solution for customers who are not ready to commit significant capital without clear evidence of return on investment.
Voice AI systems must respond with minimum delay to deliver a smooth conversational experience. High-speed AI systems drive retention rates (up to 67%), operational cost savings (30–40%), and customer satisfaction.
Research shows that people start to detect lag around 100 to 120 milliseconds, and conversation flow begins to break down not much longer after that. A response taking longer than a quarter of a second can start to feel slow or mechanical.
Parloa takes 700ms or higher, which is much higher than the optimal latency rate. With Parloa, the responses feel delayed, and users grow frustrated. Pauses can make the system appear unresponsive, causing users to interrupt, repeat their statements, or even abandon the interaction altogether.
Parloa, being NLP-centric, primarily processes text-based language data rather than real-time audio signals.
This means it can analyze, understand, and generate language in written form but lacks the specialized algorithms and hardware integration needed for live voice input, such as speech recognition or voice cloning in real time.
NLP systems without audio processing capabilities cannot effectively perform complex tasks like diagnosing voice disorders or performing voice rehabilitation.
Before you discuss the Parloa alternatives in 2024, let's consider the features you should look for when choosing your next AI-powered voice agent.
Even the voice assistant with the best features won't stand a chance if it's not cost-efficient.
The voice provider and AI assistant are the two most expensive parts of an AI caller. Some platforms require you to purchase a set amount of minutes every month. So, depending on your requirements and the configuration you want to go for, choose the platform that offers it the cheapest.
In the context of AI agents, latency refers to the time difference between when an agentic system receives a command and when it responds to it. Every millisecond brings your AI closer to human cadence, leading to higher user satisfaction, more seamless interactions and stronger engagement.
A reply that takes more than 500ms is slow. Real-time systems like voice agents handling time-sensitive tasks rely on instant processing to prevent frustration and dropped calls. In healthcare, financial services or emergency responses can affect outcomes and decisions.
The time required to deploy an AI voice agent depends significantly on the complexity of the project, the level of customization, and the readiness of the underlying infrastructure.
In very simple scenarios such as deploying a static, pre-built voice assistant with minimal customization the process can take as little as a few minutes to a few days.
For agencies and businesses that deploy complex voice agents with complex scenarios and reusable templates, AI voice agents can often be delivered in 2 to 4 weeks.
Also, it's best to look for an AI voice agent that can help you deploy faster and scale quicker as your business grows. Deployment is not the end continuous Support and maintenance are also essential for long-term success.
Voice cloning enables brands to create custom AI-powered assistants that match a specific brand's voice or personality. Powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and multilingual speech recognition technologies, these systems can respond, interpret, and understand customer queries in real time–regardless of their language or accent.
After evaluating several AI voice platforms, we've compiled a list of top alternatives to Parloa that stand out for their features, user satisfaction and performance. Let's explore each of these solutions in detail.
Synthflow's no-code and enterprise-ready capabilities set it apart from all Parloa alternatives. it handles over 45 million voice calls per month across 30+ countries, showing it’s built for both scale and reliability. Plus, it ranks as the #4 AI agents worldwide on G2; earning badges for fastest implementation and best estimated ROI.
Synthflow AI provides a drag-and-drop interface that allows users to set up a voice agent in minutes, regardless of any programming knowledge or coding ability. This accessibility is pivotal for businesses of all sizes looking to adopt AI voice agents without the need for a technical team.
Unlike Parloa AI, Synthflow provides the maximum customization with pre-built templates, custom integrations, and workflows that are tailored to your specific needs. This flexibility enables them to optimize their voice agents according to their business needs.
Its features are highly advanced compared to those of its competitors, and its use cases are well-suited for any business looking to automate aspects of its sales and marketing seamlessly.
With Synfthlow AI, businesses have a plethora of customizable voices suitable for various applications, from AI phone call systems to AI IVR and AI answering bots. From appointment booking and call transfer to lead qualification and promotional engagement, Synthflow AI can do it all.
For various industries, Synthflow AI can help in different ways:
Synthflow's versatility and ease of use empower developers and content creators to implement voice technology efficiently, ensuring that every digital interaction is as human-like and engaging as possible.
It's a telephony system that handles everything: calling, post-call actions, contact management, and lead tracking. This means you can quickly scale your calling efforts without worrying about lead management and calling efficiency.
Bland AI is a voice assistant platform that leverages its API to handle a high volume of phone calls simultaneously. Although it's not a no-code platform, it claims that users only need 10 lines of code to start running their AI voice agent. It is a versatile solution for businesses, supporting a range of use cases such as AI IVR, AI Answering Service, AI Receptionist, and AI Telemarketing.
Bland AI maintains high standards with features such as prompt filtering, call monitoring, and periodic audits to ensure trust and safety. While Bland is not as easy to use as Synthflow, many users have found Bland complex and redundant, with poor call quality and high-latency voice when using this platform.
In particular, Bland AI is suited for enterprise clients that need to manage large call volumes , with the capacity to dispatch up to 20,000 calls per hour.Any industry where you’re likely to handle large volume of calls with plenty of repetitive enquiries could benefit from using Bland AI. For instance In real estate, voice bots can answer property inquiries 24/7 and ask pre-qualifying questions (e.g., price range, location, move-in timeline).
Bland AI goes live in just 4–6 weeks compared to Parloa’s longer setup process. It also offers deeper customizability, allowing businesses to build fully tailored call flows and fine-tune language models. Unlike Parloa, Bland AI charges $0.09 per minute, billing down to the exact second, and claims zero marginal call costs for enterprises, potentially offering cost savings at scale.
Vapi AI is a middleware layer designed for companies with their underlying infrastructure, such as transcriber (speech-to-text), Intelligence (LLM, artificial intelligence and machine learning), and voice (text-to-speech) models that they want to integrate with their phone agent.
The true power of Vapi lies in the Support and maintenance provided by the team. After obtaining your API keys from third-party providers, simply provide them to Vapi and let it take care of the rest.
Since Vapi AI lacks no-code and post-call automation, it works best for businesses that are developer-centric. For instance, instead of having its end-to-end model, it asks users to bring their own. That means users are responsible for handling the end-to-end infrastructure.
Besides, Vapi AI offers a complete suite of features and a scalable infrastructure capable of handling over a million concurrent calls, making it suitable for large-scale operations. Whether it's outbound or inbound, calling Vapi AI can handle it smoothly.
Vapi AI is an excellent business option with its own end-to-end model. That means users are responsible for handling the end-to-end infrastructure. They'll have to pay for the transcriber, LLM, and voice model, along with Vapi premium pricing. If you already have a model in place, you don't need Parloa's in-built voice agent system.
Both Retell and Vapi are middleware layers that allow you to bring your own LLM and phone provider. For early-stage companies looking for a quick solution, Retell makes it easy to connect to an LLM to make calls. Again, technical knowledge is necessary to work with prompts to create phone agents with Retell.
Overall, Retell AI excels in providing a low-code infrastructure where you can access powerful APIs for agent creation, updates, and initiating phone calls. Users can choose from a variety of languages and dialects, from ElevenLabs, open voices, and Deepgram voices. However, Retell doesn't support integration with third-party tools, which can hamper your business workflow.
Similar to Vapi AI, Retell AI is more developer-centric. Retell is a great VAPI alternative for businesses that meet HIPAA compliance and are willing to pay more to connect their LLM. For industries like Healthcare and tech, where handling data securely and with legal standards is important–Retell AI ensures user privacy is consistently protected. Furthermore, Retell AI is actively working toward achieving SOC 2 Type II certification.
Retell's AI infrastructure supports high uptime and large-scale operations, including batch calling with virtually no concurrency limits. This is particularly valuable for enterprises running large outbound campaigns or handling high inbound call volumes.
Sierra AI enables businesses to build AI agents tailored to their brand identity, policies, and customer needs. These agents go beyond simple chatbots, offering dynamic, context-aware interactions that can handle complex customer inquiries and perform real actions such as updating CRM entries or managing orders across integrated business systems.
Sierra's platform leverages a constellation of large language models (LLMs) from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, ensuring high reliability and adaptability. Its core technologies include Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning and neural networks (support patterns and recognition according to customer expectations).
Sierra AI offers an omnichannel platform that helps businesses manage customer interactions across various platforms, including social media, chat, emails and ticketing systems. The platform is ideal for businesses that prioritize comprehensive omnichannel communication like e-commerce, retail, travel and hospitality.
Unlike Parloa, Sierra supports multi-channel communication (chat, email, social media), making it versatile for various customer support environments. Its advanced NLP engine maintains conversational context and adapts to nuances in language, improving the naturalness and coherence of interactions.
Poly AI delivers AI solutions that empower businesses to provide exceptional customer service that is personalized, instant, multilingual and on any channel. These assistants can understand and respond to customers regardless of accents, dialects, or speaking style, allowing for open-ended conversations where users can speak freely, interrupt, or change topics without confusion.
Poly AI has also created its own proprietary LLM called ConveRT. The ConveRT model is trained on millions of conversational samples, making it around 10% more accurate in low-data settings than models from IBM Watson, Rasa and Google Dialogflow.
PolyAI serves industries with high call volumes, such as banking, hospitality, insurance, retail, telecommunications, healthcare, and travel. Its solutions help automate routine customer inquiries, reduce wait times, and allow human agents to focus on complex or sensitive issues.
Poly AI’s voice assistants are pre-trained to automate common use cases (like authentication, order management, billing, and reservations) without extensive retraining. Real-world deployments have shown Poly AI handling over 80% of calls without escalation to a live agent and achieving up to 87% call containment on launch.
Kore.ai is a no-code platform for setting and running voice agents. The XO Platform enables both customer-facing and employee workflows across various industries, including banking, healthcare, and telecommunications. It manages natural conversations, accommodates complex integrations, and provides flexible deployment options—whether in the cloud, on-premises or hybrid environments.
The platform offers omni-channel communication, so the bots created using Kore.ai can be integrated with multiple channels like websites, mobile apps, messaging apps, and voice interfaces. So, it's ideal for businesses who want to scale their communication game with AI voice bots.
Since Kore.ai offers prebuilt voice agent templates for HR, IT helpdesk, healthcare, and BFSI. These industries can use the platform for various use cases, including:
They can easily use these templates by doing some minimum customizations to align with the brand.
Kore.ai provides an omnichannel platform designed to help businesses seamlessly manage customer interactions across multiple channels such as social media, chat, email, and ticketing systems. This platform is especially well-suited for companies that emphasize integrated omnichannel communication, including those in the e-commerce, retail, travel, and hospitality sectors.
While Parloa provides a range of features, its latency limitation, high cost, and bad customer support can damage customer relationships.
If you're looking for a user-friendly AI phone agent platform that offers easy integration and comprehensive customization, Synthflow should be your priority.
Take Synthflow's 14-day free trial now.