---
type: entity
subtype: tool
title: "Vapi"
description: "No-code voice AI platform cited as easy but a black box, which Cole and clients have moved off of for custom solutions."
resource: "https://vapi.ai"
tags: [voice, voice-agents, no-code, phone]
videos: [build-your-first-voice-ai-agent-in-20-minutes-with-livekit-open-source, turn-any-ai-agent-into-a-live-person-voice-chat-setup-in-minutes]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# Vapi

Vapi is a hosted, no-code platform for building [voice agents](../../concepts/voice-agents.md), especially phone-calling agents. Cole treats it as the recognizable easy on-ramp for voice AI, and also as the cautionary example of why teams outgrow managed black-box tools. He opens his LiveKit tutorial by pointing straight at the pattern: "I've talked to businesses before that have specifically switched from Vapi to a custom solution because you run into problems with these tools" [0:00:00]. That is the throughline across his videos, Vapi gets you a working voice agent fast, but the abstraction that makes it fast becomes the ceiling once you need real control.

The tension is a concrete instance of [provider independence](../../concepts/provider-independence.md) and the recurring lesson that convenience layers hide the machinery you eventually need. A no-code platform owns the whole [voice pipeline](../../concepts/voice-pipeline.md) for you (speech-to-text, the LLM, [tool calling](../../concepts/tool-use.md), and speech synthesis), which is exactly why it is hard to customize [clarifying-question](../../concepts/clarifying-questions.md) behavior, swap models, or debug edge cases. When those limits bite, the businesses Cole works with move to a custom stack (his LiveKit walkthrough is the open-source alternative he demonstrates), an example of graduating from a managed tool to a controllable [agent deployment](../../concepts/agent-deployment.md).

That said, Cole is fair about where Vapi wins: latency. Comparing it to a general-purpose voice setup, he notes his approach "is a little slow to generate response compared to some of like the phone calling platforms like Vapi for example" [0:11:52]. Purpose-built phone-calling platforms like Vapi are tuned for the low-latency, real-time turn-taking that live phone conversations demand, which a hand-rolled pipeline has to work harder to match.

> **Contradiction:** Cole frames Vapi both as the tool teams *leave* because of its black-box limits [build-your-first-voice-ai-agent-in-20-minutes-with-livekit-open-source, 0:00:00] and as a *latency benchmark* worth matching [turn-any-ai-agent-into-a-live-person-voice-chat-setup-in-minutes, 0:11:52]. These are not truly opposed, they reflect the real tradeoff: managed platforms buy speed and simplicity at the cost of control.

## Realizes

- [Voice Agents](../../concepts/voice-agents.md) - Real-time voice-to-voice agents built from speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines, where latency is the key constraint.
- [Voice Agent Pipeline](../../concepts/voice-pipeline.md) - The speech-to-text, LLM reasoning, and text-to-speech pipeline architecture that turns an agent into a real-time voice assistant (e.g. with LiveKit).

## Related

- [Provider Independence](../../concepts/provider-independence.md) - Architecting agents so the underlying model, framework, or client can be swapped without a rewrite, avoiding lock-in through low-level abstractions.
- [Agent Deployment](../../concepts/agent-deployment.md) - Getting agents to production, containerizing, networking, reverse-proxying, and choosing a provider-agnostic, cost-predictable host.
- [Tool Calling](../../concepts/tool-use.md) - Letting an LLM invoke external functions and APIs so it can take actions and fetch data beyond its parametric knowledge.
- [Clarifying Questions](../../concepts/clarifying-questions.md) - Having the agent ask targeted questions up front to infer intent and reduce assumptions before it plans or builds.
- [LiveKit](./livekit.md) - Open-source Python framework for building customizable, self-hostable voice AI agents with a swappable STT/LLM/TTS pipeline, tool calling, MCP server support, and a CLI deploy path to LiveKit Cloud.
- [ElevenLabs](./elevenlabs.md) - The paid text-to-speech provider used for high-quality narration and voice cloning (though cloning takes work to make reliable).
- [Aqua Voice](./aqua-voice.md) - Speech-to-text platform Cole uses to dictate into any text box, especially for communicating with LLMs.
- [Remotion](./remotion.md) - The earlier tool that first gave Claude Code a skill to generate videos; Cole found it less reliable than HyperFrames.

## Sources

- [Build Your First Voice AI Agent in 20 Minutes with LiveKit (Open Source)](../../sources/build-your-first-voice-ai-agent-in-20-minutes-with-livekit-open-source.md) - "[0:00:00] I've talked to businesses before that have specifically switched from Vapi to a custom solution because you run into problems with these tools."
- [Turn ANY AI Agent into a Live Person - Voice Chat Setup in Minutes](../../sources/turn-any-ai-agent-into-a-live-person-voice-chat-setup-in-minutes.md) - "[0:11:52] it's a little slow to generate response compared to some of like the phone calling platforms like Vapi for example"
