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How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

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121–130 of 172 posts

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#121

Very grateful that OpenAI published the article/publicized their usage of Pion[0] a library I work on. If you aren't familiar with WebRTC it's a super fun space. I work on a book WebRTC for the Curious [1] that details how it works. [0] https://github.com/pion/webrtc [1] https://webrtcforthecurious.com

WebRTC is great and so is Pion, thanks for help making and maintaining it! I loved learning about WebRTC from WebRTC for the Curious!!!

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#122

The low latency is more of a pain point than a good thing, the way they have it implemented. Trying to have a casual conversation with it, as humans we naturally pause, and GPT will take this as you are "done" and start blabbing away. I also suffer from finding the appropriate word I want as I've gotten older and slower, and this fast-voice-gpt just ends up frustrating me more than helping. I have to sit there and th…

People are migrating to the "End Of Thought" triggers. Deepgram does that wonderfully.

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#123

The low latency is more of a pain point than a good thing, the way they have it implemented. Trying to have a casual conversation with it, as humans we naturally pause, and GPT will take this as you are "done" and start blabbing away. I also suffer from finding the appropriate word I want as I've gotten older and slower, and this fast-voice-gpt just ends up frustrating me more than helping. I have to sit there and th…

This is more of a VAD/turn detection issue. It's gotten a lot better over the last few years, but it's a hard problem. The extra ~100ms of latency makes a huge difference otherwise, especially when you have use cases that require tool calling that can easily add 500ms+ of latency.

It seems that tool calling shouldn't be 500ms of latency?

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#124

I hate the voice ai though, it's so much dumber

I used to use it all the time until about a year ago or so. Its responses are full of filler and the safeguards are really overbearing. It often will just give wrong answers in a way that GPT-5.x does not. I once asked it why a particular celebrity was canceled and it refused to tell me because it may harm me to know what they said!

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these are 2 different layers of "latency". The latency in the article is referring to the transport of the audio stream itself while the latency in your scenario is about how quickly to start responding inside the audio stream.

I think he’s saying they are doing an insane level of complexity to shave ~100ms off response times in a scenario where that isn’t important and might even be a negative

By you want to be able to interject “hold on…” and have it immediately stop talking, when it goes off the rails.

And GP is correctly pointing out that the only negative here (silence waiting latency maybe being too low) is tunable separately from the network latency number.

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he’s saying they are doing an insane level of complexity to shave ~100ms off response times in a scenario where that isn’t important and might even be a negative

By you want to be able to interject “hold on…” and have it immediately stop talking, when it goes off the rails. And GP is correctly pointing out that the only negative here (silence waiting latency maybe being too low) is tunable separately from the network latency number.

I want to be able to click the "Stop" button on my earphones remote. I want to be able to interject "woah" or "stop!" or "wait!" or that it would detect that I've inhaled a breath, or that my eyes glazed over. I want the LLM to figure out that every speed setting for its voice output is in "auctioneer" territory rather than "lecturing university professor with tenure and a pension" pacing.

But we won't get any of that, because the prime directive of LLMs is to burn tokens like there's no tomorrow. Burn tokens on a naïve answer without asking clarifying questions. Burn tokens on writing, debugging, and running a Python script or accessing and parsing 10 websites without asking for consent. Burn tokens on half-baked images with misspellings and 31 fingers. Burn tokens arguing "how many 'r's in strawberry?". Burn tokens asking a followup question at the end of every single answer, begging the user to re-engage and burn more tokens.

There is a little red "Stop" control when text output is being produced, at least, but does "Stop" halt everything and throw away the context? Re-prompt from the beginning?

The "maximize tokens burnt" prime directive is not to be found in any system prompt or user documentation. It is seemingly a common feature of the training for any consumer model.

Currently, if I'm using voice for an LLM, I use the voice dictation in the keyboard feature, because then the response is in text. There is no way to prevent "responding in kind" if I query the thing with audio. Or in Swahili.

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried telling it to pause to let you think? I often use it while I’m walking and tell it to not respond until I initiate a conversation.

I’ve tried this and it says it will but just keeps cutting in. I hate this feature so much.

If anyone has an alternative I’m all ears.

This would be a killer feature for me and something I’ve tried to use on cross-country road trips.

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#129

Wait a minute... I’m genuinely happy that they are sharing this, but keep in mind that realtime audio model from OpenAI are still stuck with the 4o family in terms of capabilities, sadly. I still find them so useful, such a pity that there’s no real competitor in this segment, having the experience a real conversation has helped me so much in expressing ideas and concepts. Still, it’s worth to keep in mind that these…

Yeah I was quite surprised that the advanced chat gpt voice mode can’t itself go and message the frontier model underneath to retrieve data and then speak it. I basically tried asking it for that (something like “can you go and ask gpt5.5 to research this more in depth, and while we wait, tell me about XYZ”), but apparently that’s not a thing.

Re: How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

#130
I find OpenAI's speech-to-text model the best of the lot. It can handle my & my 5-year old daughter's Indian accent pretty well.

I wonder if they run the STT model's output through the current model (that we're chatting with) as a final pass - since the text seem to be well aligned to the current conversation context.

For long prompts, I often speak to OAI web/app and copy-paste the text to Claude / Gemini :)

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