Voice Assistants Are Designed in the Silence

Short summary

A deep dive into the architectural challenges of production voice assistants, focusing on barge-in handling, turn detection, and end-to-end latency optimization. The article emphasizes that silence and pause handling are architectural concerns, not afterthoughts, and provides a comprehensive testing checklist for production readiness. Concludes with a pitch for Smallest.ai's voice agent platform.

• •Barge-in handling changes audio capture, state management, model context, and playback architecture—it can't be added late
• •Production testing must cover noisy audio, interruptions, packet loss, code-switching, and p95 latency under concurrency
• •The complete turn from user's last speech frame to audible playback must be measured in named stages and optimized at the bottleneck

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.