TLDR Tech / Dev
How I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch
This dev built a custom voice agent from scratch that achieved sub-500ms latency, outperforming off-the-shelf platforms. Voice agents are fundamentally an orchestration challenge, requiring real-time coordination of Speech-to-Text (STT), Large Language Models (LLM), and Text-to-Speech (TTS) with precise turn-taking logic. Some optimizations he made included pipelining the agent's response, aggressively canceling in-flight generation during user interruptions, selecting LLMs with fast time-to-first-token (like Groq), and making sure all services are geographically co-located.
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