Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know A voice agent lives or dies on a single number: how long the caller waits between finishing their sentence and hearing your agent begin its reply. Hold that under roughly 800 milliseconds and the conversation feels natural; drift past it and every exchange picks up a small, corrosive pause that makes the agent feel slow and eventually not worth talking to. This guide is about architecting a cascaded voice agent — speech-to-text, then a language model, then text-to-speech — that holds a sub-800ms round trip in the real world, on a Mumbai mobile line or a London landline, without pretending latency is someone else's problem. The good news is that the budget is achievable with today's tooling if you are disciplined about two things: streaming every stage so the pipeline…
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