Practical Interruption Handling for Voice Agents
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-07-20
This workshop covers three major challenges of production-grade voice agents:
- Interruption Handling: When users interject while the model is replying, the system must decide whether to stop immediately, fade out, or finish the sentence.
- Silence Detection: The system must determine if the user has actually finished speaking or is just thinking; otherwise, it risks premature interruptions or creating awkward dead air.
- Latency Control: The entire chain from STT, LLM, to TTS has a budget of only about 200ms.
The speaker emphasizes that the difficulty of voice agents isn't "the AI itself," but audio engineering: WebSocket orchestration, audio chunking, backpressure when the LLM can't keep up with real-time input, and echo cancellation. The implementation stack is Pipecat + Daily (WebRTC) + any STT/TTS + any LLM.
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