Build Your Own AI Phone Assistant: Outbound Calls & Function Calling

Ready to take your AI phone assistant to the next level? This comprehensive guide walks you through building a sophisticated system capable of both outbound calls and function calling. Harness the power of OpenAI for conversation management, Deepgram for speech-to-text and text-to-speech, Replit for code hosting, and Make.com for outbound call automation. Transform your lead generation and appointment setting processes with this innovative AI solution. Let's explore how to piece together all the components of this powerful AI phone system.

DIY AI Caller: Unlocking Outbound Call Capabilities

Building an AI phone assistant opens a world of possibilities for automating communication tasks. While an inbound caller answering basic FAQs has its uses, the true potential lies in outbound calling and function calling. These features allow your AI assistant to proactively engage with leads, schedule appointments, and perform various tasks by interacting with external services.

The focus is expanding an existing DIY AI caller to handle outbound calling and function calling. By using OpenAI to manage conversations and Deepgram for Text-to-Speech/Speech-to-Text, the guide builds upon a solid foundation.

In the initial setup, there is an inbound caller answering basic FAQs. Now, we're adding outbound calling and function calling.

What makes this setup even more accessible is that the code runs on Replit, a user-friendly online IDE. The outbound call mechanism, triggered by Make.com, utilizes a basic HTTP module. This module can easily integrate with Google Sheets, allowing you to automatically call a list of leads as they come in, transforming your lead management process. This blog is all about completing the Puzzle, and the missing piece is outbound calls and function calling.

Diving Deep: Replit, Make.com, OpenAI, and Deepgram

This section details the technologies involved in building an AI phone assistant with outbound calling and function calling capabilities:

• Replit: An online integrated development environment(IDE) that allows users to write and run code in various languages. It simplifies coding and deployment, especially when setting up and running AI caller projects.
• Make.com: A visual platform for building automations and integrating different applications, enabling AI phone assistants to perform outbound calls through HTTP requests.
• OpenAI: An AI research and deployment company, its technology is used to manage conversations in the AI phone assistant, making interactions feel more human-like.
• Deepgram: A speech-to-text and text-to-speech service, used to convert spoken words into text and vice versa, improving the communication effectiveness and quality of the AI phone assistant.

The Power of Function Calling

Function calling elevates your AI assistant beyond simple Q&A. It allows the AI to interact with external APIs and services, enabling complex workflows. For example, the guide explores how to integrate with Google Calendar, allowing the AI to schedule appointments directly during a phone conversation. This transforms the assistant into a powerful appointment setter.

Function calling provides endless customization. The guide will give a specific example - booking appointments into Google Calendar.

This feature acts as an appointment setter. Resources to do this are available on Gumroad. The aim is to enable the user to run the system within 10 minutes.

This integration streamlines operations and improves customer experience. Any function call can be integrated.

Cost Considerations for Your AI Assistant

Understanding the costs associated with running your AI phone assistant is crucial for budgeting and maximizing efficiency. The guide provides a detailed breakdown of the expenses involved, allowing you to make informed decisions about your deployment strategy.

The AI caller costs around 1 cent per minute. This will be same cost as video one.

Cost breakdown:

• API text to speech and speech to text was 0.88 of a cent.
• OpenAI portion was under 1 cent per minute.

These figures can vary depending on usage volume, conversation complexity, and specific configuration choices. The costs were 1 cent per minute. It's cheaper than that.

Latency Optimization

Minimizing latency is vital for creating a seamless and natural conversational experience. The guide discusses latency issues and provides strategies for optimization. The existing setup has a delay of one to one and a half seconds, with Function calling, it's longer. There is non-streaming involved.

There are sections of code that can improve the text to speech. It's chunking down in a specific way. You can make that streaming. You can make it faster. All other code is streaming. The guide will show how to start the Tutorial on the video to make it faster.

There are also other coding options to be more advanced.

Preparation

Before you start, here's what you will need:

• A Replit account.
• A Make.com account.
• An OpenAI API Key.
• A Deepgram API key.
• A Google Calendar account (if implementing the appointment Scheduling function).

Step 1: Setting Up Replit

Create a new Replit project and import the necessary code files. This will serve as the hosting environment for your AI assistant. Detailed instruction available with video tutorial.

Step 2: Configuring Make.com for Outbound Calls

Set up a Make.com scenario to trigger outbound calls. This involves using the HTTP module to make requests to your Replit-hosted AI assistant. Configure the Scenario to read numbers from a Google Sheet or other data source.

The code is demonstrated with Make.com and is not streaming. Make.com scenario explained with HTTP modules to Replit. It demonstrates how these work.

Step 3: Implementing Function Calling

Integrate your AI assistant with the Google Calendar API using function calling. This involves defining a function that can create calendar events and configuring OpenAI to use this function during the conversation. Specific Google Calendar instruction will be given to integrate.

Step 4: Deploying and Testing

Deploy your Replit project and test the entire workflow. Make sure outbound calls are triggered correctly and that appointments are being scheduled in Google Calendar.

Deepgram

The cost is approximately 0.88 cents for the API to perform text-to-speech/speech-to-text functions. This is a major portion of cost with these types of AI callers, so it is worth investigating the efficiency and speed to optimize this section of the code.

OpenAI

The cost to use the OpenAI API to manage the conversation and to perform function calls is less than 1 cent per minute. This cost may vary depending on the complexity of the model and the number of tokens used. Monitoring token usage is a good habit to optimize and lower OpenAI call costs.

Lead Generation

Automatically call leads from a list to qualify them and gather information, dramatically increasing efficiency in your sales process.

Appointment Setting

Enable your AI assistant to schedule appointments directly with potential clients, freeing up your team to focus on high-value tasks.

Customer Support

Use the AI assistant to proactively reach out to customers with updates, reminders, or to Gather feedback, improving overall satisfaction.