Plivo

Plivo is a communications platform that now sells AI agents on top of its voice and messaging network. The site describes it as a way to "Build human-like voice AI agents" and, in the words of the homepage, to go "From no-code agent builder to carrier-grade telephony." Its builder is for product teams who want an agent running without engineers, and for developers who want to wire their own speech and language models into a phone line. The pages do not name a headquarters, but the legal line reads Plivo Inc.

What you build and how

There are two ways in, and the homepage lays them out side by side.

The no-code route is the AI Agent Studio. The idea is "Describe it. Vibe Agent builds it": you write what you want in plain English, Vibe Agent builds the flow, you test it in the Playground and then go live from your browser. The homepage shows two sample prompts: "Outbound agent for collecting post-delivery feedback. Ask 3 short rating questions and log responses to the CRM" and "Inbound support agent. Look up order status by phone number and read out the ETA." The studio is described as visual and prompt-driven, with drag and drop simplicity, and the agent deploys across voice, chat, SMS and WhatsApp. A three-step walkthrough on the AI Agents page starts with describing your use case and then lets Vibe Agent set up actions, triggers and integrations automatically. The page also lists analytics alongside the Playground.

The programmatic route is for developers. The page says: "Start with our fully managed stack or strip it down to just audio streaming. Bring your own STT, TTS, and LLM, or use ours." Code samples are offered in Python, Node and Go, plus REST, and the page shows a command line example that creates an agent with a chosen voice and language. The documentation adds two specific recipes. One is building voice agents with SIP trunking, connecting agents built on platforms like LiveKit, ElevenLabs and Vapi to the phone network. The other is audio streaming, building voice agents with frameworks like Pipecat by streaming live call audio over WebSockets. So a team that already built a bot elsewhere can use Plivo only for the telephony.

The homepage puts a sample dental clinic call on display, with an agent called Aria rescheduling an appointment, which is the kind of conversation the platform is made to run. The site states latency under 500 ms, uptime of 99.99% and coverage of 150+ countries for the AI agent product, and says it offers real phone numbers on a self-serve basis.

The chatbot side is the multichannel promise: the same studio agent can answer on chat, SMS and WhatsApp, not only on the phone. The SMS product page also describes AI agents for text messaging, configured with your brand's vocabulary, personality and tone of voice, and notes integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho for syncing customer data.

Voice is the larger share of the product. The pricing page says the platform includes at no extra charge concurrent calls, CPS, the Vibe Agent builder, Simulation Testing, Transfer to Human and a Knowledge Base. In other words, testing and handing a caller to a person are part of the base product rather than add-ons.

The evidence from the pages

Pricing is per minute and published. The pricing page lists:

• Voice AI agents at $0.03/min excluding telephony, which "covers voice models, transcription, and orchestration. Telephony is billed separately."
• Telephony for SIP Trunking and Audio Streaming, with outbound calls starting at $0.0010/min and inbound at $0.0028/min.
• Add-on services such as Secure Trunking, Noise Cancellation, Call Recording, 50 concurrent calls and 3 CPS call throughput.
• A pay-as-you-go start with "$10 in free credits. No credit card required."

The pricing page also carries a set of questions, among them what is available on pay as you go, whether international coverage is offered, what the free trial includes, how AI agent costs are calculated, whether spending limits can be set, which payment methods are accepted and whether a contract is required. Other products sit on a different footing. The page says SMS and Verify API, and the WhatsApp API, are "Available in Enterprise plan only (starts at $1,000 /month)", with SMS messages starting at $0.0077 each, WhatsApp messages starting at $0.00374 each and WhatsApp calls starting at $0.0040/min. So the $0.03 voice agent price and the enterprise messaging price are separate things, and the pricing page treats WhatsApp and SMS as enterprise items. It also lists "Compliance - BAA, HIPAA & SSO" among its enterprise topics, with custom pricing, volume discounts and concurrency.

On the company, the About page says Plivo was founded in 2011 and has been profitable since 2015, handles 1B+ API requests a month and serves 190+ countries. It describes three layers: the AI Agent Platform on top, an API Suite for messaging and voice in the middle and the carrier network at the core. The SMS page shows badges for HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, PCI DSS and STAR next to a 99.99% uptime statement, though that page is about the messaging product.

Who it suits and who it does not

The documentation index covers guides, API references and quickstarts for Voice, Messaging, SIP Trunking and Voice AI, so developers have a written path in. The SMS page lists what that product handles: OTPs, alerts and notifications, promotional and loyalty campaigns, and conversational messaging.

Plivo suits an operations or CX team that wants a phone agent for appointment changes, order status or feedback calls and likes a per-minute price it can calculate. It also suits developers with an existing voice stack who need dependable telephony and a place to run it. The mix of studio and SDKs means a team can start with a prompt and move to code later.

It is a weaker fit if you want a text-only website chatbot with a flat monthly plan, since the pricing is organized around minutes and messages and the main story is voice. A few caveats apply. The $0.03 a minute is only the agent layer, so your real cost adds the telephony. SMS and WhatsApp sit in the enterprise plan that starts at $1,000 a month. And the pages describe the studio's steps but do not publish a template count, so ask what ships with the Playground before you commit.