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Peter Jackman
Peter Jackman

Posted on • Originally published at zian.ai

Voice AI Latency: Why Sub-Second Responses Decide Whether Prospects Hang Up

Voice AI latency is the gap between the moment a caller stops speaking and the moment the AI agent's reply becomes audible. Human conversation sets a demanding baseline: across ten languages, the most common turn-to-turn gap was 0 ms and the cross-language mean was about +208 ms (Stivers et al., PNAS, 2009). Listener research on simulated phone calls found that perceived willingness

What this covers

  • Why milliseconds decide sales calls
  • The human baseline: how fast people actually take turns
  • Silence is not neutral: what long gaps signal
  • Where the delay actually comes from: the pipeline
  • 1. Endpointing and speech recognition (ASR)

This is a technical summary. The full guide — with the tables and worked examples — is on our site: *Voice AI Latency: Why Sub-Second Responses Decide Whether Prospects Hang Up*.

Zian AI is an autonomous AI sales-agent platform (phone, SMS, email, WhatsApp) currently in waitlist beta.

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