Building Voice Agents with Real-Time Streaming
Architecting low-latency, bidirectional audio streaming pipelines using WebSockets and multimodal LLMs.
Real-time conversational voice agents require rethinking traditional request-response architectures. End-to-end latency must remain below 500ms to feel natural to human interlocutors.
Full-Duplex Audio over WebSockets
Instead of chunking audio files and batch-processing with speech-to-text, we establish persistent full-duplex WebSockets streaming raw PCM audio chunks back and forth.
Voice Activity Detection (VAD)
Handling user barge-in cleanly is critical. Client-side or edge-based VAD detects incoming speech immediately, interrupting model audio generation and preventing overlapping responses.
Conclusion
By pairing low-latency multimodal LLM APIs with real-time audio protocols, developers can build genuinely conversational AI assistants.