Real-time voice pipelines: the latency budget, turn-taking and streaming
Architect a voice assistant: the cascaded ASR to LLM to TTS pipeline versus speech-to-speech models, a worked 1,030 ms latency budget, voice activity detection and endpointing, barge-in, streaming at every stage, transport (WebRTC), and testing.
17 min·Verified 2026-11Pro+50 XP
A voice conversation feels natural only if the assistant starts answering within roughly a second of the user finishing. That requires treating the pipeline as a real-time system with a budget.
Pro content
Keep reading with Inference Academy Pro
Unlock the rest of this lesson, plus every advanced lesson, hands-on lab, the larger playground models and completion certificates.