Speak AI vs Retell AI:
voice agents plus
the analysis layer.
Retell AI is developer infrastructure for building phone agents. Speak AI ships voice agents ready to launch, then adds what Retell leaves out: transcription for any recording, audio and video analysis, and a shared archive your whole team can search.
Sara K.
Devin M.00:19 / 12:47
Two different jobs, side by side
Retell AI is excellent infrastructure for engineering teams building real-time phone agents. It was never built to transcribe your uploaded recordings, read a screen, or give a team one searchable archive of every conversation. Here is the direct comparison.
| Feature | Speak AI | Retell AI |
|---|---|---|
| Audio analysis (tone, emotion, energy) | Yes, on Scale plans | Sentiment score on its own agent calls only |
| Video analysis (what’s on screen) | Yes, on Scale plans (reads slides and screens) | No video capture or analysis |
| AI voice agents | Yes, launched from your workspace, no code | Yes, developer API, ~600ms latency |
| Transcribe uploaded audio/video files | Yes, any format or length | No, its agents’ live calls only |
| Meeting capture (notetaker bot) | Yes, Zoom, Teams, Meet | No |
| Embeddable recorder for participants | Yes | No |
| Post-call analysis | Across every recording, from any source | Yes, on calls its agents handle |
| NLP analytics (keywords, sentiment, entities) | Yes, across your whole library | Per-call extraction fields only |
| AI chat across all recordings | Yes (Claude, GPT, Gemini) | No cross-call AI chat |
| Languages supported | 100+ | 30+, strongest in English |
| No-code interface | Yes, built for the whole team | Developer-first; code for real deployments |
| White-label / custom branding | Yes, native | Via third-party wrapper platforms |
| MCP tools for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor | 100+ tools to query your archive | Yes, for building and managing agents |
| G2 rating | 4.9/5 | 4.8/5 |
| Pricing model | Free trial, then flat plans | $0.07-$0.31/min, usage-based (Aug 2026) |
A call log was never the whole conversation.
Retell tells you a call happened and how it went. Speak AI reads the words, the voice, and the visuals together, for every conversation your team has, then keeps all three searchable in one archive.
One system of record for every conversation
Agent calls, sales calls, meetings, interviews, and uploaded recordings all land in one shared workspace with folders, permissions, and search. Retell’s dashboard covers only the calls its own agents handled.
Tone of voice, emotion, and energy
Speak AI scores how a call actually sounded, beyond what was said. Frustration, hesitation, and confidence get flagged automatically, so coaching and QA have something real to grade.
What’s on screen and body language, read
When there is video, Speak AI reads what was shared on screen and the body language on camera, and ties both to the moment in the transcript. Retell is voice-only by design.
Six ways in, one place out
Meeting notetaker, embeddable recorder, mobile app, file upload, URL import, and voice agents. Unified capture means recordings from any phone system, including calls run on platforms like Retell, can be uploaded and analyzed.
Trends across thousands of calls
Keywords, sentiment, entities, and topics are extracted automatically and tracked over time, so patterns across your whole library show up as a report instead of a hunch.
Custom applications on full context
Every transcript, audio signal, and screen read builds a context engine your team’s custom applications draw on, through the API, webhooks, or the MCP server inside Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor.
Retell AI vs Speak AI: what each platform is actually built for
Retell and Speak AI solve different problems for different buyers, and plenty of teams use both. Here is the honest breakdown, including where Retell genuinely wins.
What Retell AI does well
Retell AI is a Y Combinator-backed voice agent platform that has earned its reputation. Its proprietary orchestration delivers roughly 600ms response latency, which makes phone conversations feel natural, and it powers over 50 million calls a month for contact centers in healthcare, insurance, logistics, and financial services (as of mid-2026). It holds SOC 2 Type II certification, offers HIPAA and GDPR compliance, integrates with Twilio, Five9, Genesys, Amazon Connect, HubSpot, and Salesforce, and its post-call analysis returns transcripts, sentiment scores, and custom extraction fields for every call its agents handle. For an engineering team building a high-volume phone automation product, Retell is a legitimately strong choice, and it earned a 4.8/5 on G2.
Where a phone agent stops being enough
Retell is a component: it runs the call and reports on the call. It cannot transcribe the recorded interview on your laptop, the Zoom meeting your team had yesterday, or the customer calls sitting in your old phone system. Speak AI is the layer above the call: multimodal analysis that reads the words, the tone of voice, the emotion in voice, and, when there is video, the body language and what’s on screen. That full context is the categorical difference between a call log and a system of record. A call scoring rubric, a coaching workflow, or a research synthesis needs all three layers, and it needs them for every conversation, whichever tool carried it.
Voice agents without an engineering project
Speak AI includes AI voice agents you launch from your workspace with no code, and every agent call lands directly in the same archive as your meetings and uploads, already transcribed and analyzed. Retell’s developer API goes deeper on custom telephony engineering: fine-grained conversation flows, IVR navigation, batch campaigns at contact-center volume. If you have engineers and a phone-automation product to build, that depth matters. If you want an agent answering calls this week, with the analysis included, you do not need the engineering project.
Predictable pricing vs per-minute stacking
As of August 2026, Retell prices per minute: its published range is $0.07 to $0.31 per minute all-in, assembled from voice infrastructure at $0.055/min, text-to-speech from $0.015 to $0.04/min, an LLM from $0.003 to $0.16/min, and telephony around $0.015/min, plus monthly line items for phone numbers, extra concurrency, and add-ons like knowledge bases and PII removal. It is fair pricing for infrastructure, and a $10 signup credit lets you test it, but the total is hard to predict before you know your volume. Speak AI offers a trial and flat subscription plans, with transparent pricing that does not stack per-minute charges.
Better together: run the calls, then own the context
These platforms are often used together. Teams run high-volume real-time calls on Retell, then bring recordings into Speak AI for post-call analysis, compliance review, coaching, and research synthesis alongside every other conversation the company has. Because Speak AI keeps transcript, audio signal, and screen content together, teams build custom applications on top of it: dashboards, call scoring rubrics, research coding, and reporting, through the API or the MCP server. That is context engineering: turning every conversation into contextual knowledge your tools and assistants can actually use.
What the analysis layer looks like in practice.
A national sports federation needed more than a log of its recorded conversations.
“Speak AI helped us process hours of recorded athlete and coach interviews in multiple languages. We could finally identify themes and sentiment patterns across all our qualitative data in a fraction of the time.”
The federation had hours of recorded conversations in multiple languages and needed to transcribe them, analyze sentiment across hundreds of sessions, and share findings organization-wide. A real-time-only tool cannot touch existing recordings; that is precisely the gap between running calls and understanding them. Speak AI uploaded the files, ran multi-engine transcription and NLP analytics across languages, and delivered a shared dashboard that saved the research team weeks of manual analysis. The same workflow applies to any team sitting on recorded calls, whatever system captured them.
Bring your context into Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor.
Retell’s MCP server helps developers build and manage its voice agents. Speak AI’s MCP server answers a different question: it gives any assistant 100+ tools to search, analyze, and act on your full knowledge base, transcripts, audio signals, and screen reads included, in about 60 seconds. No terminal, no npm, no config, backed by a full developer API.
Which one is right for you?
Both are good products. They are built for different jobs.
Choose Retell AI if you…
- Have an engineering team building a custom phone-automation product
- Need ~600ms latency at contact-center call volume
- Want deep telephony integrations: Twilio, Five9, Genesys, Amazon Connect
- Need SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA-compliant voice agent infrastructure
- Are comfortable assembling per-minute LLM, voice, and telephony pricing
Choose Speak AI if you…
- Want voice agents live this week, launched without code
- Need every conversation, calls, meetings, interviews, and uploads, in one archive
- Want audio analysis and video analysis: tone, emotion, and what’s on screen
- Need NLP analytics and AI chat across your whole recording library
- Work in 100+ languages across global teams
- Need native white-label branding without a third-party wrapper
- Want your archive inside Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor over MCP
Pricing comparison
Speak AI starts free to evaluate and scales by plan. Retell AI is usage-based, per minute, per component. Pricing checked August 2026.
Speak AI
- Pay as you go: transcription and AI chat, credits-based
- Individual plan with transcription, storage, AI chat, and analysis included
- Team plan with shared libraries, collaboration, and priority support
- Enterprise: custom SSO, data controls, white-label, custom agents
- Free trial, more credits with a work email
Retell AI (as of August 2026)
- $0.07 to $0.31 per minute all-in for voice agents
- Stacked components: voice infra $0.055/min + TTS + LLM + telephony
- Phone numbers $2/month; extra concurrency $8/month each
- Add-ons per minute: knowledge base, guardrails, PII removal
- $10 free credit to test; enterprise plans are custom
Teams build on Speak AI.
Real feedback from teams using Speak AI for calls, research, meetings, and client work.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions when comparing Speak AI and Retell AI.
It depends on the job. If your engineering team is building a custom phone-automation product on an API, Retell is a strong choice. If you want voice agents that launch without code, plus transcription, audio and video analysis, NLP analytics, and a shared searchable archive for every conversation, Speak AI covers the whole workflow in one platform.
Yes. Retell AI is a Y Combinator-backed company powering over 50 million calls a month as of mid-2026, with SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA and GDPR compliance, and a 4.8/5 rating on G2. The real question is fit: it is developer infrastructure for real-time phone agents, and it does not transcribe or analyze recordings from outside its own calls.
As of August 2026, Retell AI’s published price is $0.07 to $0.31 per minute all-in for voice agents, stacked from voice infrastructure ($0.055/min), text-to-speech, an LLM, and telephony, plus $2/month per phone number, $8/month per extra concurrent call, and per-minute add-ons. Speak AI uses flat subscription plans with a trial instead of per-minute stacking.
Paid and usage-based. Retell gives new accounts a $10 credit and includes 20 concurrent calls, 10 knowledge bases, and 100 quality-assurance minutes free, but production use is billed per minute. Speak AI offers a trial and flat plans, so you can evaluate and budget without metering every minute.
Yes. Retell AI offers HIPAA compliance along with SOC 2 Type II certification and GDPR compliance, which is a genuine strength for healthcare contact centers. Speak AI supports enterprise deployments with SSO and custom data controls; talk to the team about your compliance requirements.
On voice agent infrastructure, Retell competes with Vapi, Bland AI, Synthflow, and ElevenLabs agents. Speak AI sits in a different category: it includes no-code voice agents but pairs them with transcription, audio and video analysis, and a team archive, so it is the alternative when you need the analysis layer, and it works alongside any of those platforms.
No. Retell transcribes the calls its own agents handle; you cannot upload a recorded meeting, interview, or call from another system. Speak AI transcribes and analyzes uploads of any length and format, in 100+ languages, alongside live meeting capture and its own voice agents.
Yes. Speak AI includes AI voice agents you set up from your workspace without code, and every agent call lands in the same archive as your meetings and uploads, already transcribed and analyzed. Retell goes deeper on custom telephony engineering for high-volume contact centers; Speak AI makes agents part of a complete conversation platform.
Retell has a dashboard for prototyping, but it is a developer-first platform: real deployments involve APIs, LLM configuration, and telephony setup. Speak AI is built for the whole team, with a no-code interface for recording, transcription, analysis, voice agents, and AI chat.
Start with Speak AI.
Voice agents, transcription, audio and video analysis, NLP analytics, multi-model AI chat, and 100+ languages, in one shared archive. Book a free consult and see it on your own recording.
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