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Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

ntik.me

11–20 of 168 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

#11
post #9

Great writeup! For VAD did you use heaphone/mic combo, or an open mic? If open, how did you deal with the agent interupting itself?

I was using Twilio, and as far as I'm aware they handle any echos that may arise. I'm actually not sure where in the telephony stack this is handled, but I didn't see any issues or have to solve this problem myself luckily.

Re: Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

#12
"Voice is an orchestration problem" is basically correct. The two takeaways from this for me are

1. I wonder if it could be optimised more by just having a single language, and

2. How do we get around the problem of interference, humans are good at conversation discrimination ie listing while multiple conversations, TV, music, etc are going on in the background, I've not had too much success with voice in noisy environments.

Re: Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

#13
post #7

Nice write-up, thanks for sharing. How does your hand-vibed python program compare to frameworks like pipecat or livekit agents? Both are also written in python.

I'm sure LiveKit or similar would be best to use in production. I'm sure these libraries handle a lot of edge cases, or at least let you configure things quite well out of the box. Though maybe that argument will become less and less potent over time. The results I got were genuinely impressive, and of course most of the credit goes to the LLM. I think it's worth building this stuff from scratch, just so that you can be sure you understand what you'll actually be running. I now know how every piece works and can configure/tune things more confidently.

Re: Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

#14
IMO STT -> LLM -> TTS is a dead end. The future is end-to-end. I played with this two years ago and even made a demo you can install locally on a gaming GPU: https://github.com/jdarpinian/chirpy, but concluded that making something worth using for real tasks would require training of end-to-end models. A really interesting problem I would love to tackle, but out of my budget for a side project.

Re: Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

#15
Hi all! Check out this Handy app https://github.com/cjpais/Handy - a free, open source, and extensible speech-to-text application that works completely offline.

I am using it daily to drive Claude and it works really-well for me (much better than macOS dictation mode).

Re: Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

#16

IMO STT -> LLM -> TTS is a dead end. The future is end-to-end. I played with this two years ago and even made a demo you can install locally on a gaming GPU: https://github.com/jdarpinian/chirpy , but concluded that making something worth using for real tasks would require training of end-to-end models. A really interesting problem I would love to tackle, but out of my budget for a side project.

If you're of that opinion, you'll enjoy the new stuff coming out from nvidia:

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/personaplex/

Re: Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

#17
This is an outstanding write up, thank you! Regarding LLM latency, OpenAI introduced web sockets in their Responses client recently so it should be a bit faster. An alternative is to have a super small LLM running locally on your device. I built my own pipeline fully local and it was sub second RTT, with no streaming nor optimisations https://github.com/acatovic/ova

Re: Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

#19
post #17

This is an outstanding write up, thank you! Regarding LLM latency, OpenAI introduced web sockets in their Responses client recently so it should be a bit faster. An alternative is to have a super small LLM running locally on your device. I built my own pipeline fully local and it was sub second RTT, with no streaming nor optimisations https://github.com/acatovic/ova

Very cool! starred and on my reading list. Would love to chat and share notes, if you'd like
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