Google guide: non-blocking ADK voice agents cut first-response latency from 14.4s to 1.2s
rseroter · x · 2026-10-20
A step-by-step Google Developers Blog guide shows how to build voice agents that never go silent using the open-source ADK and gemini-3.8-live. Blocking tool calls create dead air in live voice (users assume the call dropped), so the fix is architectural: streaming tools that yield results incrementally, non-blocking FunctionTool definitions with immediate acknowledgments, and responsescheduling for when background results get spoken. Switching a benchmark sales-report workflow from blocking to streaming tools cut time-to-first-words from 14.4s to 1.2s.
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