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WanjohiChristopher
WanjohiChristopher

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VOICE AI SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

๐ŸŽ™๏ธIโ€™ve been diving deep into Voice AI Agents and decided to map out how they actually work.

You know when you ask Alexa or ChatGPT Voice a question and it justโ€ฆ responds intelligently?

Thereโ€™s a lot happening in that split second.

How do voice agents work?

At a high level, every voice agent needs to handle three tasks:

๐Ÿ‘‰Listen - capture audio and transcribe it
๐Ÿ‘‰Think - interpret intent, reason, plan
๐Ÿ‘‰Speak - generate audio and stream it back to the user

Voice AI Architecture

A Voice AI Agent typically goes through five core stages:
๐Ÿ”นSpeech is converted to text (ASR).
๐Ÿ”นThe system understands intent and entities (NLU).
๐Ÿ”นIt reasons about what action to take (Dialog Manager / Agent Logic).
๐Ÿ”นIt generates a response (NLG).
๐Ÿ”นSpeaks it back naturally (TTS).

This same agent-style architecture powers Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and modern LLM-based voice agents like ChatGPT Voice.

I put together a diagram to visualize the full end-to-end pipeline behind Voice AI Agents - from speech input to intelligent action and response.

Iโ€™m planning to break down each component and share more on how agent-based voice systems are built.

Which Voice AI agent do you interact with the most?

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