TL;DR

Today we’re excited to launch HiSanta.ai, an online experience that allows you to have real-time voice conversations with LLM-powered Santa and Friends. This is something we’ve been tinkering with in the Fixie workshop over the past few weeks, and we’re excited to share it with you. The entire experience is built using the Fixie platform, including our just-released, alpha Fixie Voice APIs.

Give it a try, tell Santa what you’re hoping to find under the tree this year, and let us know what you think by getting in touch at hello@fixie.ai.

Why Voice?

We all love the convenience of text-based messaging, but for high-bandwidth conversations, nothing beats the convenience (and speed) of voice. Unfortunately, while LLMs are incredibly powerful, they’re also notoriously slow. To date, this has resulted in voice-based demos that feel artificial and awkward as you wait several seconds for a reply from the LLM, or hear the same canned filler phrases designed to cover up this delay.

Luckily, we’ve got a Fixie for this (pun intended). We’ve built a brand-new Agent + Voice stack, optimized from the ground up for low latency interactions. We still have a lot of work to do in order to achieve fully natural conversations, but we think this is the first big step.

Talk to Santa and His Friends

Choose to talk to Santa or one of his friends

Given the time of year, we thought it would be fun to build a Santa AI with whom you can just talk. Talk to Santa and ask him if you’re on the nice (or naughty) list. We also built a few more characters too: Mrs. Claus, Elfie, and Rudolf. These characters are all AI agents built and hosted on Fixie and are powered by our new voice APIs.

We invite you to do a couple of things right now:

• Try out HiSanta.ai → Talk to Santa and his friends at HiSanta.ai. Have fun!

• Spread some Holiday Cheer → Tell your friends and family about HiSanta.ai. We think they will have fun with it and we would love to get as many people testing it out as possible so we can put the voice platform through its paces.

• Naughty? Send ‘em Bad Santa → If you know someone who has been naughty, send them this special link (it’s just appending ?nice=0 to the querystring) so they get the appropriate treatment 🙂.

• Give us Feedback → How did the interactions go? Did they feel natural? What could have been better. Let us know via a quick email.

Works on mobile or desktop

Going Open Source

We’re excited about the types of experiences that can be built with the combination of AI + high-quality, low-latency voice interactions. To help you get started building your own experiences, we’re open sourcing the HiSantai.ai project and are releasing an alpha version of Fixie Voice today. We’ve managed to get the typical latency down to around one second between turns and there’s a lot more in the pipeline that will help us make our voice interactions feel even more natural.

The easiest way to start tinkering is to grab the source code for HiSanta.ai and take a peek at the new Voice capabilities in the JS SDK. You’ll also need to sign up for a free Fixie account to get started building agents using our online, no code agent builder.

Key Links

• HiSanta.ai →https://hisanta.ai

• HiSanta.ai (Bad Santa) →https://hisanta.ai?nice=0