Leveraging Existing Voice Infra vs. Building Custom Models: A Cost & Scalability Lens

Divyansh Chauhan

Jul 21, 2025

As voice AI technologies advance rapidly, organizations face a crucial decision when integrating voice capabilities: whether to leverage existing commercial voice infrastructure or to invest in building custom voice AI models. This choice deeply impacts cost, scalability, performance, and long-term flexibility. This article provides a technical comparison of these two approaches under cost and scalability considerations.

Leveraging Existing Voice Infrastructure

There are several ready-to-use voice AI tools in India with low upfront costs and predictable pay-as-you-go pricing that scales with usage. These platforms handle variable workloads efficiently through elastic cloud infrastructure, with providers managing updates and maintenance. 

While they deliver high-quality, well-maintained models, customization and voice cloning options especially for Indian languages and dialects are limited. Deployment is mostly cloud-based with straightforward API integration, but offline and edge capabilities remain constrained, which can impact applications in regions with intermittent connectivity.

Building Custom Voice AI Models

Building custom voice AI models in the Indian context offers greater control but demands significant investment. Initial costs are high due to the need for large annotated datasets, development, and infrastructure, along with ongoing expenses for computing resources and skilled personnel. Scalability depends on the organisation’s infrastructure and requires careful planning to manage latency and varying workloads. 

This approach supports full customisation, including tailored voice styles and robust multilingual support for India’s diverse languages, as well as proprietary voice cloning. Deployment options are flexible, allowing on-premise, private cloud, or hybrid setups to address data privacy and connectivity challenges across different regions.

Technical Comparison Table: Existing Infrastructure vs. Custom Models

This technical comparison highlights the key differences between existing voice infrastructures and custom voice AI models. It covers important factors such as costs, scalability, customisation, latency, data privacy, and language support to help you assess which approach best fits your technical and business needs.

Criteria

Existing Voice Infrastructure

Custom Voice AI Models

Initial Investment

Low (Pay-as-you-use)

High (Data, Compute, Talent)

Operational Cost

Scales with usage, predictable

Variable, compute & maintenance intensive

Scalability

Near Unlimited

Depends on the infrastructure

Customization

Limited customization and voice cloning

Full control 

Latency

Varies from very low to high

Can be optimised with infrastructure changes

Model Updating

Done by providers

Controlled by internal teams

Data Privacy 

Data sent to third party

Complete control on data handling

Indian Languages Support

Currently very limited 

Depends on training data & effort

Deployment Flexibility

Mostly cloud based, edge limited

Cloud, edge, hybrid options

Conclusion

Choosing between leveraging existing voice infrastructure and building custom voice AI models hinges on balancing cost, scalability, customization needs, and data control. Existing commercial platforms drive rapid deployment with manageable costs and excellent scalability, suitable for most general-purpose applications. Custom models demand larger investment but unlock peak performance, full customization, and strategic data privacy benefits necessary for specialized or high-scale deployments.

Organizations should evaluate projected voice interaction volumes, latency needs, required voice characteristics, and regulatory constraints to select the optimal approach that aligns with both technical excellence and business goals.

The future of frontline is one conversation away.

Connect with our team and learn how Hunar can help you grow your frontline team better.

Get in touch

Mid 20s Indian frontline construction worker

The future of frontline is one conversation away.

Connect with our team and learn how Hunar can help you grow your frontline team better.

Get in touch

Get in touch

Mid 20s Indian frontline construction worker
Mid 20s Indian frontline construction worker