Voice Agents

Building real-time voice AI agents: choosing a voice stack, managing latency and turn-taking, speech-to-text and text-to-speech, LiveKit and Pipecat.

A voice agent has roughly the length of a conversational pause to respond, and every component in the chain spends part of it. Speech recognition, the model call, any retrieval and speech synthesis all run inside that budget, so a stack that feels fine in text becomes awkward the moment a caller has to wait.

These articles cover the choices behind production voice AI: which speech and telephony providers to pair, how to keep latency down as the agent grows, and what builders running voice agents at scale actually struggle with. Framework integrations for LiveKit and Pipecat live under Agent Frameworks and are listed here as well.

Start here: Voice AI use case · Latency optimization (glossary)