A Bolna alternative for Hindi and Hinglish phone agents

How do Bolna and Voice Infra differ?

Bolna is an orchestration platform for Indian voice agents. Its docs split a minute into three parts: voice AI (transcription, the LLM and text-to-speech, covered by a flat rate while the agent uses Bolna’s preferred models), telephony charged by the carrier, and Bolna’s own platform fee. Pick a model outside the preferred list and that component leaves the flat rate and is billed at the provider’s rate. You can also bring your own LLM, TTS and ASR keys.

Voice Infra runs one stack, the Mira stack, on every tier. Mira STT and Mira TTS are our own models, and there are no provider keys to bring. On T5 and T3, the per-minute rate also includes Mirai phone calling and call insights, so the rate is the whole minute. On T1, phone calling and insights become optional line items.

What does a minute cost on each?

Bolna’s pricing page shows its standard rate as 6.00¢ a minute, which its FAQ puts at about ₹5.52, for the voice AI part. Telephony and the platform fee are added per minute on top. Larger top-ups bring the effective rate to about 4.5¢ (₹4.15), and the Pilot plan’s $500 for 12,000 minutes works out to about 4.2¢. At the standard rate, 1,000 minutes of voice AI is 1,000 × ₹5.52 = ₹5,520 before telephony and the platform fee.

On Voice Infra, 1,000 minutes on T5 is 1,000 × ₹5 = ₹5,000 with the phone line included. If your volume is steady, T1 is ₹1 a minute: its ₹1,00,000 monthly minimum buys 1,00,000 minutes, and Mirai phone calling adds ₹0.30 a minute only when we carry the call. T3’s ₹50,000 minimum buys 16,666 minutes at ₹3 (₹50,000 ÷ ₹3). All our prices exclude GST.

For short calls the billing unit also moves the bill. Bolna’s Pilot plan bills in 30-second pulses; we bill every tier in 10-second blocks. A 41-second call is 60 billed seconds in pulses and 50 in blocks. The pricing guide shows how to forecast a month with your own answer rate and call length.

What does moving a Bolna agent look like?

The agent’s prompt and greeting carry over as system_prompt and first_message on POST /v2/agents, with per-call details as {{variables}}. If your Bolna agent follows a script with branches, a node-based agent may fit better, and Agent Studio can draft one from a description or from recordings of your calls; the prompt versus node guide helps decide. Tools run before, during and after a call to fetch context or update your CRM. Bulk calling moves to campaigns, which dial an uploaded contact list inside the hours you set and pause themselves if the wallet runs out.

Transfer to a human is not available on our side yet, and a new workspace starts at 5 concurrent calls until we raise it, which needs no code change. The India API guide covers the integration end to end.

What should you test before switching?

Take recordings of real Hindi and Hinglish conversations, with consent, and write test scripts around the parts that break agents: names, rupee amounts, pin codes, dates and English product words said in the middle of Hindi. Run the same script on both platforms against your own phone, on the carrier your customers use.

Time what the caller hears, from the end of their sentence to the first audio of the reply, on a real line and across enough calls to see the slow end. The latency guide explains how. Then compare the invoice: billed seconds after each platform’s rounding, telephony on both sides, and the platform fee where it applies.