Real-Time Voice Agent Architecture: WebRTC, Cascaded Pipelines vs. Native Speech-to-Speech, and Sub-500ms Latency Budgets
Building production-grade real-time voice AI systems requires engineering around a strict physical constraint: human conversational cadence. In natural human dialogue, the typical gap between turns ranges from 200 to 300 milliseconds. When an interactive voice agent incurs a total round-trip latency above 700 milliseconds, users perceive the interaction as sluggish. When latency exceeds 1,000 milliseconds, conversational dynamics collapse into frequent interruptions, speech collisions, and awkwa
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