Pricing
This page introduces the billing policy for the use of Agora Conversational AI Engine.
When you use Conversational AI Engine in your project, Agora charges a fee in your monthly bill. See Billing for details. At the end of each month, Agora calculates the total usage of Conversational AI Engine across all projects under your developer account, subtracts the free quota, and multiplies the remaining usage by the corresponding unit price to calculate the total cost. The final amount is rounded to two decimal places.
Unit price
Creating a Conversational AI Engine instance using the RESTful API and joining a channel incurs an audio task fee at the following rate:
| Usage Type | Pricing (USD / minute) | Free Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Conversational AI Engine Audio Basic Task | 0.0099* | First 300 minutes are free |
| ARES ASR Task | 0.0166 | First 300 minutes are free |
| *Applicable when you bring your own key (BYOK) for the ASR vendor or the multimodal large language model (MLLM). The unit price includes the audio RTC subscription fee of the engine instance. | ||
Starting with v1.6 the original "Conversational AI Engine Audio Task" is now itemized as two separate services: Audio Basic Task and ARES ASR Task.
Your total cost for using ARES ASR remains the same: $0.0099 (Basic) + $0.0166 (ARES ASR) = $0.0265 per minute.
This new billing structure applies to all usage from v1.6 onwards and will be reflected in your upcoming invoices.
Examples
The following examples demonstrate how billing is calculated for different Conversational AI Engine configurations.
Example 1: With ARES ASR
User A joins a channel and starts a voice conversation with an instance created by Conversational AI Engine. The interaction lasts for 10 minutes. User A and the Conversational AI Engine instance exit the channel at the same time. Agora calculates the cost for this session as follows:
| Usage Type | Duration (minutes) | Unit Price | Service Cost (USD) | Total Cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| User A: Audio RTC | 10 | 0.00099 | 0.0099 | 0.2749 |
| Conversational AI Engine Audio Basic Task | 10 | 0.0099 | 0.099 | |
| ARES ASR Task | 10 | 0.0166 | 0.166 |
Example 2: BYOK
User B joins a channel and starts a voice conversation with an instance created by Conversational AI Engine configured to use their own key for the ASR provider or the multimodal large language model (MLLM). The interaction lasts for 10 minutes. User B and the Conversational AI Engine instance exit the channel at the same time. Agora calculates the cost for this session as follows:
| Usage Type | Duration (minutes) | Unit Price | Service Cost (USD) | Total Cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| User B: Audio RTC | 10 | 0.00099 | 0.0099 | 0.1089 |
| Conversational AI Engine Audio Basic Task | 10 | 0.0099 | 0.099 |
Example 3: BYOK + AI Avatar
User C joins a channel and starts a voice conversation with an avatar instance (720p) created by Conversational AI Engine configured to use their own key for the ASR and avatar provider. The interaction lasts for 10 minutes. User C and the Conversational AI Engine instance exit the channel at the same time. Agora calculates the cost for this session as follows:
| Usage Type | Duration (minutes) | Unit Price | Service Cost (USD) | Total Cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| User C: Video HD RTC | 10 | 0.00399 | 0.0399 | 0.1488 |
| Avatar: Audio RTC | 10 | 0.00099 | 0.0099 | |
| Conversational AI Engine Audio Basic Task | 10 | 0.0099 | 0.099 |