Voice Activity Detection and Turn-Taking Architecture in Production Voice AI: Comparing Silero VAD, WebRTC VAD, PyAnnote Audio, and Semantic Endpointing
Real-time voice AI agents depend on two sequential decisions: identifying when a user is speaking, and predicting when they have finished their conversational turn. Acoustic Voice Activity Detection (VAD) handles the first problem at the audio frame level, while turn-taking endpointing manages dialogue state transitions. Mistakes in either layer degrade conversational flow. Inaccurate VAD causes false interruptions from background noise or misses quiet speech onsets. Naive silence-based endpoin
