Launch HN: Cekura (YC F24) – Testing and monitoring for voice and chat AI agents
47 pointsby atarus6 hours ago10 comments
  • guerythona minute ago
    we treat each scenario as an explicit state machine. every conversation has checkpoints (ask for name, verify dob, gather phone) and the case only passes if each checkpoint flips true before the flow moves on. that means if the agent hallucinates, skips the verification step, or escalates to a human too early you get a session-level failure, not just a happily-green last turn. logging which checkpoint stayed false makes regressions obvious when you swap prompts/models.
  • jamram8225 minutes ago
    Testing voice agents would require some kind of knowledge integration. Do you have any plans to support custom knowledge bases for test voice agents ?
    • atarus9 minutes ago
      Yes, we already support knowledge base integrations for BigQuery and plan to expand the set of connectors. You can always drop knowledge files currently.

      Moreover, we even generate scenarios from the knowledge base

  • chrismychen34 minutes ago
    How do you handle sessions where the correct outcome is an incomplete flow — e.g. the agent correctly refuses to move forwards because the caller failed verification, or correctly escalates to a human?
    • atarus5 minutes ago
      This comes from our architecture. Since we are aware of the agent's context our test agents know the incomplete flows and the assertions are per session.

      If we miss some cases, there's always a feedback loop to help improve your test suite

  • niko-thomas31 minutes ago
    We've tried a few platforms for voice agent testing and Cekura has been the best by a long shot. Keep up the great work!
  • FailMore4 hours ago
    Any ideas how to solve the agent's don't have total common sense problem?

    I have found when using agents to verify agents, that the agent might observe something that a human would immediately find off-putting and obviously wrong but does not raise any flags for the smart-but-dumb agent.

    • rush86999an hour ago
      Only solution is to train the issue for the next time.

      Architecturally focusing on Episodic memory with feedback system.

      This training is retrieved next time when something similar happens

      • atarus34 minutes ago
        Training is an overkill at this point imo. I have seen agents work quite well with a feedback loop, some tools and prompt optimisation. Are you doing fine-tuning on the models when you say training?
    • atarus4 hours ago
      To clarify you are using the "fast brain, slow brain" pattern? Maybe an example would help.

      Broadly speaking, we see people experiment with this architecture a lot often with a great deal of success. A few other approaches would be an agent orchestrator architecture with an intent recognition agent which routes to different sub-agents.

      Obviously there are endless cases possible in production and best approach is to build your evals using that data.

  • sidhantkabra6 hours ago
    Was really fun building this - would love feedback from the HN community and get insights on your current process.
  • moinism5 hours ago
    congrats on the launch! do you guys have anything planned to test chat agents directly in the ui? I have an agent, but no exposed api so can't really use your product even though I have a genuine need.
    • atarus4 hours ago
      Yes, we do support integrations with different chat agent providers and also SMS/Whastap agents where you can just drop a number of the agent.

      Let us know how your agent can be connected to and we can advise best on how to test it.

  • michaellee83 hours ago
    Interesting, I have built https://github.com/michaellee8/voice-agent-devkit-mcp exactly for this, launch a chromium instance with virtual devices powered by Pulsewire and then hook it up with tts and stt so that playwright can finally have mouth and ears. Any chance we can talk?
    • atarus3 hours ago
      That's actually interesting. Is it a dependancy on user to create the HTTP endpoints for the /speak and /transcript?

      One of our learnings has been to allow plugging into existing frameworks easily. Example - livekit, pipecat etc.

      Happy to talk if you can reach out to me on linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarush-agarwal/

  • octoclaw2 hours ago
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  • berz014 hours ago
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