The Voice Agent Latency Playbook: STT, Turn Detection, and the Tradeoffs Nobody Talks About

Here's a test you can run on any voice agent in about ten seconds. Ask it a simple question, then interrupt it halfway through the answer. Then say something it has to look up. If the thing feels alive through all three, someone spent real time on latency. If it feels like a walkie-talkie with a bad connection, they didn't.

Latency is the single metric that decides whether a voice agent feels like a conversation or a phone tree. And it's the one most teams get wrong, because they optimize the number they can see on a dashboard instead of the delay the user actually feels.

So let's talk about where the delay really comes from, which levers move it, and the tradeoff that trips up almost everyone: the fastest transcript is not the fastest agent.

What "latency" even means in a voice agent

When people say "my agent is...

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