BYOK (Bring Your Own Key)
BYOK lets you bring your own LLM, STT and TTS API keys — the voice AI platform routes usage through your accounts instead of bundling provider costs.
BYOK stands for Bring Your Own Key. In voice AI, BYOK means you bring your own API keys for the underlying LLM, STT and TTS providers (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepgram, ElevenLabs) and the voice AI platform uses your keys when making requests. Usage is billed directly by each provider to your own account. BYOK gives you full control over provider choice, cost, compliance, and pricing — the platform only charges a thin orchestration fee on top.
Why BYOK matters
Without BYOK, a voice AI platform bundles provider costs into its own pricing and takes a margin on every minute of audio. With BYOK, you pay providers directly — usually at lower rates than the platform's bundled price — and the platform only charges a predictable orchestration fee. For high-volume workloads the savings are large.
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 that provider costs go on your provider invoice, not the platform's invoice.
BYOK on ThinnestAI
ThinnestAI supports BYOK for every major LLM (OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Gemini, Sarvam, Mistral, DeepSeek), STT (Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Sarvam Saaras) and TTS (ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Sarvam Bulbul). Some providers — including Sarvam — are also available platform-managed for free-tier usage, so you can get started with zero keys and add your own as you scale.
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 phone number — via Twilio, Vobiz or Exotel — and connect it to the voice AI platform via SIP 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.