Building a Sub-500ms Latency Voice Agent: Technical Architecture and Implementation

I've spent the last six months working on a startup, building agent prototypes for one of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world.

The technical takeaway was clear: voice agents are still too slow for real-time conversations.

I built a voice agent from scratch that achieves sub-500ms latency end-to-end, including speech recognition, LLM processing, and speech synthesis.

The key insight is that you need to build your own audio pipeline to achieve truly low latency.

WebRTC is the only technology that gives you sub-100ms audio transmission over the internet.