Why Latency Matters in a Voice AI Call

A caller notices the pause before they notice how smart the reply is. If the pause lasts long enough that they start talking again, the two voices collide.

This article names the steps in that pause. It does not give Wirevox a measured speed. The old heading on this page, “How We Achieve Sub-400ms at Wirevox,” is removed. There is no test on this site to support that number.

What happens after the caller stops

A voice turn is a sequence:

1. Detect the end of speech. The system has to decide the person has finished, so it waits through a short pause.
2. Transcribe. The audio becomes text.
3. Draft a reply. A language model writes the next thing to say.
4. Speak. That text is turned back into audio.
5. Send it. The audio has to cross the phone network.

If those steps run one after another, and each one waits for the previous one to finish, the caller hears the sum of all five.

What shortens the wait

Voice systems shorten that sum by starting the next step before the previous one is finished. The first words of a reply can be spoken while the rest of the sentence is still being written. Deciding that a person has finished can use the words themselves, not only silence.

Those are techniques, not a Wirevox measurement. A speed claim would need a defined test, a sample, and a date. None of those are published here.

You can hear a test conversation in the playground. The product is described on AI voice agents.

What to listen for

Call the agent and talk over it once. If it keeps speaking through you, or if you repeat yourself because you think it missed you, the wait is too long for that call. Call analytics is where a saved test call can be read afterward.