Real-Time Voice Agents
A voice agent is a soft-real-time media system wrapped around an LLM. The reasoning is the easy part; the hard part is timing: get audio in, decide when the human actually stopped talking, think, and get audio back out fast enough that the conversation feels alive. Miss the timing and users talk over the agent, repeat themselves, and hang up. This chapter covers the architecture, the latency budget, the 2026 stack, and the production failure modes.