The economics of a voice agent: what a minute of conversation actually costs

Most voice agent pricing starts with a single number: voice agent cost per minute. However, this figure doesn’t reveal much about the real cost of running a production system.

I discovered this firsthand while building and running a voice agent for enterprise use. When you factor in speech recognition, text-to-speech, model usage, telephony, and infrastructure, a production minute involves several different costs.

This is why it’s more helpful to look at the cost per successful outcome instead.

What sits inside a voice minute

A production voice agent usually has five main cost layers, mainly:

• Speech-to-text converts incoming audio to text and is typically priced per audio minute.
• LLM inference charges by tokens, not by time. Longer calls can cost more as the model processes instructions, conversation history, and tool results.
• Text-to-speechturns responses back into audio and is usually priced by characters, tokens, or the amount of...

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