Conversational AI voice agents represent the next frontier of outbound prospecting. Engineering a realistic voice agent requires achieving end-to-end conversational turnaround times under 500 milliseconds (including speech-to-text, LLM inference, and text-to-speech audio streaming).
1. Sub-500ms Voice Pipeline Latency Budget
| Pipeline Component | Target Latency | Optimized Technology |
|---|---|---|
| Audio Ingestion & VAD | 50 ms | WebRTC WebSocket Stream + Silero Voice Activity Detection (VAD) |
| Speech-to-Text (STT) | 120 ms | Deepgram Nova-2 / Whisper Streaming |
| LLM Token Generation | 180 ms | Groq Llama 3.3 70B / OpenAI Realtime API (First token TTFT) |
| Text-to-Speech (TTS) | 150 ms | ElevenLabs Turbo v2 / Cartesia Sonic WebSocket |
