Building a Real-Time Voice AI Agent: Lessons Learned

Users feel latency first

Model quality matters, but stalls and dropped audio end conversations faster than a wrong answer sometimes.

End-to-end testing

Simulate noisy environments. Real microphones and networks are messier than lab audio.

Observability

Log turn boundaries and failures. You cannot improve what you do not measure.

Scope

Start with a narrow task the agent can complete reliably. Expand only after metrics look good.