Voice Agent Production Pain Points: STT Latency and Endpointing Are the Real Bottlenecks
FormalStatistician92 · reddit · 2026-08-05
The author discusses the real engineering challenges of production-grade voice agents, noting that while people often blame the LLM, STT (Speech-to-Text) is usually the first thing to break.
- Common failures: Bad endpointing, slow final transcripts, mismatches between partial and final transcripts, poor barge-in handling, trashy phone audio, and wrong number/date recognition.
- Stack options: Shortlists STT solutions like Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and Smallest AI Pulse for live agents, emphasizing that delivering usable text fast is more critical than pure accuracy.
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