AssemblyAI breaks down voice agent architecture

AssemblyAI · x · 2026-08-28

An AssemblyAI engineer proposes splitting a voice agent into two roles:

1. The Responder: Always online, handling VAD, streaming transcription, TTS, and barge-in. This is the latency-critical hard part; failures drive users away.

2. The Thinker: Exists only briefly after turn detection to generate the response. This holds the core product logic (data, rules, escalation) and is just a URL config field in their API.

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