August 19, 2026·Sri Raghu Malireddi & Abhishake Kumar Bojja·15 min read

Building Voice AI That Feels Human: A Latency Budget Breakdown

Voice AI has no typing indicator. Silence is the interface. A breakdown of the 800 millisecond time-to-first-audio budget across endpointing, speech recognition, retrieval, LLM inference, speech synthesis, transport, and playback, and how to keep the voice turn path small enough that users never say Hello twice.

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Blog

Building Voice AI That Feels Human: A Latency Budget Breakdown

The Production AI Stack: A Reference Architecture for Real-Time AI Systems

We Built a Voice AI Agent for Our Website. Then Other Companies Started Asking for It.

What Happens When You Remove the Network Hop from RAG

The Retrieval Latency Tax: Why Your AI Agent Feels Slow (And It's Not the LLM)

We Spent a Decade Making AI Feel Instant. Here's What We Learned.

Loading

Blog

Building Voice AI That Feels Human: A Latency Budget Breakdown

The Production AI Stack: A Reference Architecture for Real-Time AI Systems

We Built a Voice AI Agent for Our Website. Then Other Companies Started Asking for It.

What Happens When You Remove the Network Hop from RAG

The Retrieval Latency Tax: Why Your AI Agent Feels Slow (And It's Not the LLM)

We Spent a Decade Making AI Feel Instant. Here's What We Learned.