Architecture

The fastest way to give a product a voice today is a speech-to-speech model: one realtime model that hears audio and speaks audio directly, like OpenAI’s Realtime API or Gemini Live. And for simple voice interaction it is genuinely good. Ask your app a question, dictate a note, chat hands-free while driving. One API call, natural prosody, low latency. When voice is a supplementary experience layered on top of a product, this is the right tool, and you can stop reading here. ...

Voice agents are easy to demo and hard to scale. The architecture we ended up with fires every possible response in parallel and lets a fast router pick the winner mid-flight. This post walks through everything we tried before it, and why this design is the one we kept. The problem nobody’s demo solves Every voice agent demo looks the same: clean audio, a cooperative user, a short scripted exchange. Then you ship it, and two things break immediately. ...