BYOK (Bring Your Own Key)
BYOK lets you bring your own LLM, STT and TTS API keys so a voice AI platform routes usage through your own provider accounts instead of billing it through the platform.
BYOK stands for Bring Your Own Key. In voice AI, BYOK means bringing your own API keys for the underlying LLM, STT and TTS providers (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepgram, ElevenLabs) so the platform uses your keys when making requests, with each provider billing usage directly to your account. It's a model some voice AI platforms offer to unbundle provider costs from their own fee. ThinnestAI prices differently — a flat, all-inclusive ₹2/minute rate with no separate provider bills to track.
Why some platforms offer BYOK
Some voice AI platforms bundle LLM, STT and TTS provider costs into their own per-minute price; others let you bring your own API keys so provider usage is billed directly to your account, with the platform charging only its own orchestration fee on top. The appeal is provider choice and cost control — you pick the model that fits your workload and can negotiate your own provider rates at volume.
What BYOK is not
BYOK is not self-hosting. You still use the platform's flow editor, phone infrastructure, no-code builder and hosting. The only thing that changes is which invoice the provider usage lands on.
How ThinnestAI prices voice AI
ThinnestAI doesn't run a BYOK model for LLM, STT or TTS providers. Pricing is a flat ₹2/minute, all-inclusive — telephony and the full voice stack are covered in that one rate, with no provider keys to manage and no separate line items to reconcile. What you can still bring is your own Plivo phone number — see BYON — so if you already have one, you keep your existing carrier relationship and DLT registration while ThinnestAI handles the AI layer.
More definitions
A voice AI agent is an AI system that holds real-time spoken conversations via phone, web or SIP — combining speech recognition, an LLM and speech synthesis.
Voice AI is the umbrella term for AI that understands and generates human speech in real time — powering voice assistants, phone agents and translation.
Conversational AI is the category of AI that interacts with humans in natural language across chat, voice, email and messaging — using NLU, LLMs and tools.
IVR is a rigid scripted tree (press 1 for sales). Voice AI is a natural-language agent that understands free-form speech, reasons and calls tools.
BYON lets you bring your own Plivo phone number and connect it to the voice AI platform instead of renting one.
SIP trunking lets a voice AI platform send and receive phone calls over the internet, connecting to the PSTN via a carrier like Twilio or Vobiz.