Realtime Voice Agents

Realtime voice agents are the next frontier of conversational AI. Unlike traditional chatbots, voice agents stream audio in both directions simultaneously, detect when you're speaking or silent, let you interrupt mid-sentence, and respond with human-like latency budgets measured in hundreds of milliseconds. This series teaches you how to architect, prompt, and deploy production voice agents from scratch.

You'll learn the core technologies: realtime speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) APIs that stream continuously, voice activity detection (VAD) to know when the user is actively speaking, turn-taking logic to orchestrate who speaks when, and barge-in handling so users can naturally interrupt. You'll master the latency budget—every millisecond matters when you're talking to a machine—and discover how to invoke tools (like database lookups or API calls) mid-conversation without breaking the flow. By the end, you'll integrate with telephony systems (SIP, PSTN) and deploy a fully functional voice agent to production.

This series assumes you're familiar with LLMs and prompt engineering. Each article is self-contained but builds on prior knowledge. Start with speech API basics, then advance through the real-time mechanics, and culminate in a deployed agent handling live phone calls.

Articles in this series​

Articles in this series