Voice AI in Production: Engineering the 300ms Latency Budget
· 10 min read
Most teams building voice AI discover the latency problem the same way: in production, with real users. The demo feels fine. The prototype sounds impressive. Then someone uses it on an actual phone call and says it feels robotic — not because the voice sounds bad, but because there's a slight pause before every response that makes the whole interaction feel like talking to someone with a bad satellite connection.
That pause is almost always between 600ms and 1.5 seconds. The target is under 300ms. The gap between those two numbers explains everything about how voice AI systems are actually built.
