voice-agents

# Voice Agents Voice agents represent the frontier of AI interaction - humans speaking naturally with AI systems. The challenge isn't just speech recognition and synthesis, it's achieving natural conversation flow with sub-800ms latency while handling interruptions, background noise, and emotional nuance. This skill covers two architectures: speech-to-speech (OpenAI Realtime API, lowest latency, most natural) and pipeline (STT→LLM→TTS, more control, easier to debug). Key insight: latency is the constraint. Humans expect responses in 500ms. Every millisecond matters. 84% of organizations are increasing voice AI budgets in 2025. This is the year voice agents go mainstream. ## Principles - Latency is the constraint - target <800ms end-to-end - Jitter (variance) matters as much as absolute latency - VAD quality determines conversation flow - Interruption handling makes or breaks the experience - Start with focused MVP, iterate based on real conversations - Combine best-in-class components (Deepgram STT + ElevenLabs TTS) ## Capabilities - voice-agents - speech-to-speech - speech-to-text - text-to-speech - conversational-ai - voice-activity-detection - turn-taking - barge-in-detection - voice-interfaces ## Scope - phone-system-integration → backend - audio-processing-dsp → audio-specialist - music-generation → audio-specialist - accessibility-compliance → accessibility-specialist ## Tooling ### Speech_to_speech - OpenAI Realtime API - When: Lowest latency, most natural ...