Krisp alternatives for voice agents and call centers (2026)

Short answer. The main alternatives to Krisp VIVA for primary-speaker isolation in October 2026 are ai-coustics Quail Voice Focus (on-prem SDK, from $135 a month billed annually), AssemblyAI Voice Focus (an option inside its streaming STT, +$0.10 per hour), LiveKit Cloud voice isolation ($0.0012 per minute after included minutes, which itself runs Krisp or ai-coustics models), NVIDIA Speaker Focus (GPU, early access) and Anecho v8_2 (in-process SDK, 15 ms on CPU, $0.0010 per minute after 10,000 free minutes a month). Krisp itself is integrated with LiveKit and Pipecat and resold by several platforms; teams mostly look elsewhere because its direct price is not public and access goes through an application.

We sell one of the alternatives, so read this as a vendor's post. Every vendor fact links to the vendor's own page, accessed in October 2026; prices are as listed on 2026-10-20. We have not measured Krisp, so nothing here says anything about its quality. The longer, all-vendor version of this table is in speaker isolation SDKs compared (2026).

What Krisp offers

Krisp's developer page lists VIVA as five models: Voice Isolation 2.5, Turn Prediction, Interruption Prediction, voice activity detection and signal detectors. Voice Isolation 2.5 is declared at 15 ms on CPU, takes PCM 16 kHz mono (the HD variant 32 kHz), ships server SDKs for Python, Node.js, Go and iOS, and integrates with LiveKit and Pipecat. The page says "Isolate the primary speaker's voice" (krisp.ai/developers/voice-isolation). That is marketed as primary-speaker isolation, not only noise suppression.

Why people look for alternatives

These are the factual reasons we hear, not a judgement of the product.

• The direct price is not public. The developer pricing page has two tiers, Early stage and Enterprise, and both go to "Apply Now"; no price is listed (krisp.ai/developers/pricing). You can budget a platform-resold rate instead: Pipecat Cloud lists Krisp VIVA at $0.0015 per minute after 10,000 free minutes (daily.co), and LiveKit Cloud includes it in a $0.0012 per minute slot (livekit.com/pricing).
• Access is by application. There is no self-serve key for the server SDK; a team that wants to test on a Saturday has to wait for a reply.
• Price can be tied to a platform. The public Krisp rates are platform rates: they apply while you run on that platform. Telnyx lists "Noise Suppression - Krisp" at $0.005 per leg per minute (telnyx.com).
• Sample rate. The SDK I/O is 16 kHz mono, 32 kHz on HD. Krisp says Voice Isolation 2.5 supports narrowband and telephony audio (Krisp blog), so 8 kHz is not by itself a reason to switch; check what your pipeline actually carries.

The shortlist

Alternative	Where it runs	Declared latency	Public price (as listed on 2026-10-20)	Self-serve	Primary-speaker isolation	Measured by us
ai-coustics Quail Voice Focus 2.2	On-prem SDK	Under 30 ms	$135/mo (100K min) to $540/mo (500K), billed annually; Enterprise from $2,000/mo	Yes, up to Business	Yes	Yes
AssemblyAI Voice Focus	Cloud, inside streaming STT	Not published	+$0.10/hr ($0.0017/min) on Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime	Yes, $50 free credit	Yes	No
LiveKit Cloud voice isolation	LiveKit Cloud (Krisp VIVA or ai-coustics Voice Focus 2.1)	Not published	$0.0012/min after included minutes (Build 100, Ship 1,000, Scale 10,000)	Yes, with a plan	Yes	No
NVIDIA AFX SDK, Speaker Focus	NVIDIA GPU	Not published	Not published	Early Access program	Yes	No
Anecho v8_2	In-process on your servers, CPU; hosted API	15 ms	$0.0010/min after 10,000 free min/month, down to $0.0005	Yes, instant key, no card	Yes	Yes (our own)
Picovoice Koala	On-device	Not published	Not published	Free AccessKey sign-up	No, noise suppression	No
DeepFilterNet / GTCRN	Anywhere	Not published	Free (open source)	Yes	No, noise suppression	Yes

Sources: ai-coustics pricing, ai-coustics model reference, AssemblyAI Voice Focus docs, AssemblyAI pricing, LiveKit pricing, LiveKit noise cancellation docs, NVIDIA Speaker Focus, Picovoice Koala docs, DeepFilterNet, GTCRN, and for our row /docs/sdk and /pricing. All accessed October 2026.

A note on LiveKit: its voice-isolation slot runs Krisp VIVA among its models, so choosing it can mean keeping Krisp with a published per-minute price, rather than leaving it.

The alternatives, briefly

• ai-coustics Quail Voice Focus. Targets "one primary speaker for machine listening", native 16 kHz, with an SDK that accepts 8 to 192 kHz and resamples internally; SDKs for Python, Node.js, C, Rust and WASM. Self-serve checkout on annual tiers. It is the one alternative we have benchmarked head to head against our own model; see below.
• AssemblyAI Voice Focus. A voice_focus parameter (near-field or far-field) on streaming transcription. The fit is narrow and simple: if AssemblyAI is your STT, it is a toggle. It does nothing for audio that goes to another recogniser or to a native-audio model.
• LiveKit Cloud voice isolation. A metered filter in LiveKit Cloud. The docs recommend plain noise suppression instead for multi-speaker or diarization use.
• NVIDIA Speaker Focus. Part of the Audio Effects SDK, 16 or 48 kHz, published as early access, with throughput figures for GPUs from T4 to B100. For teams that already run GPU inference next to the call.
• Picovoice Koala, DeepFilterNet, GTCRN. Noise suppression, not isolation. They fit a single talker in a noisy room, not a caller with a television behind them.

Where Anecho fits, and where it does not

Anecho is the closest match to Krisp's deployment model in the list: an SDK you run in your own process on CPU, 15 ms of algorithmic delay, 16 kHz in and out. The differences are commercial: the price ladder is public (pricing), 10,000 minutes a month are free, and a key comes from the dashboard without an application or a card.

It fits when:

• you want to test today and budget from a published number (voice isolation pricing in 2026);
• audio must stay in your process for compliance (GDPR and in-process audio);
• your callers are close to the microphone and the background voices are loud. On our live-conversation benchmark, with background voices as loud as the talker, v8_2 scored 37.19% WER against 55.94% for ai-coustics Quail VF 2.2 S with faster-whisper base.en, and 33.06% against 60.95% with Gemini Live input transcription.

It does not fit, or not yet, when:

• your talkers sit back from a laptop in a reverberant room. On the same run Quail VF 2.2 S leads by +9.58 pp [+5.52, +13.90] there with faster-whisper base.en, and at −10 dB with Gemini Live (+7.74 pp [+2.48, +12.77]);
• what you need most is silence between turns. VF S suppressed background voices by 17.4 dB in the talker's pauses, against 8.5 dB for v8_2, and under Gemini Live it triggered 52 false barge-ins against 125 for v8_2;
• your audio is one person in plain noise. A noise model such as ai-coustics Quail L is closer to the untouched audio on our matrix (15.18% against 16.59% for v8_2);
• you need Krisp's other models (turn and interruption prediction, signal detectors) from one vendor, an iOS SDK, or a native 32 kHz path. We ship one 16 kHz isolation model with a VAD, for Node and Python.

And one fact applies to all of us: pooled over our 19-condition matrix, the untouched audio (14.32% WER) beat every engine we measured. We have not measured Krisp, so we cannot tell you where it sits on that table. The way to know is to run your own calls through each candidate against a do-nothing control, as in how to evaluate speaker isolation.

FAQ

What is the closest alternative to Krisp VIVA?

By deployment model, an in-process CPU SDK with primary-speaker isolation: ai-coustics Quail Voice Focus (under 30 ms, on-prem SDK) or Anecho v8_2 (15 ms). By integration, LiveKit Cloud voice isolation, which runs Krisp VIVA among its models at $0.0012 per minute after included minutes.

How much does Krisp VIVA cost?

Krisp does not publish a direct price; its developer pricing tiers go to "Apply Now". As listed on 2026-10-20, Pipecat Cloud resells Krisp VIVA at $0.0015 per minute after 10,000 free minutes a month, and LiveKit Cloud includes it in a $0.0012 per minute voice-isolation slot.

Does Krisp do speaker isolation or only noise cancellation?

Speaker isolation. Krisp markets Voice Isolation 2.5 as isolating the primary speaker's voice, in addition to its noise-cancellation products.

Is Anecho better than Krisp?

We do not know: we have not measured Krisp. On our own benchmark we have only measured ai-coustics, where the live-conversation result depends on the recogniser (parity with faster-whisper base.en, a v8_2 lead with Gemini Live input transcription) and the condition decides who leads.

Which Krisp alternatives are self-serve?

As listed on 2026-10-20: Anecho (instant key, no card), ai-coustics (checkout up to its Business tier), AssemblyAI ($50 free credit, no card) and LiveKit Cloud (with a plan). NVIDIA Speaker Focus is in an early access program.