6.4 Voice & Realtime Agents¶

Latency budgets first: turn detection, barge-in, speech-to-speech versus cascaded streaming pipelines, telephony, and per-minute economics.

Also called: voice agents, realtime agents, speech-to-speech (S2S), cascaded voice pipelines.

Stub: scaffolding, not finished writing · planned for a later release. The skeleton below shows the beats this chapter will hit. Contributions welcome.

Why you'd reach for it¶

The problem, what breaks without it, and when you need it. To be written.

What it actually is¶

A crisp definition, the maturity call argued with cited evidence, and how it differs from its neighbours. To be written.

How to do it¶

The mechanics, with public tools named plainly where the reader can verify them; code only where a tested listing earns its place. To be written.

Gotchas¶

The real costs and when not to, feeding the Anti-Patterns Catalog. To be written.

In short¶

A weighted recommendation: what you would actually do. To be written.

Maturity: Emerging (settling fast; the cascaded pipeline is the dominant production shape today) · Grounding: research · Last reviewed: 2026-08

Sources¶

Citations added as the chapter is written. Every non-obvious claim gets a footnote.