Build a voice-to-voice agent (ASR to LLM to TTS) that feels natural at under 500ms end to end. Break down the latency budget.
Under 500ms from end of speech to first audio out, across three models and a network. The trick is that you never wait for any stage to finish: you stream and pipeline everything.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Under 500ms from end of speech to first audio out, across three models and a network. The trick is that you never wait for any stage to finish: you stream and pipeline everything.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
