Every voice agent platform’s marketing page cites a latency figure well under a second. An independent benchmark that measured five platforms, Telnyx, ElevenLabs, Bland AI, Vapi, and Retell AI, on the same fixed caller script, reading Time to First Audio Byte…
Your Voice Agent Sounds Robotic Because of This Latency Bug
Key takeaways ITU-T G.114, the international telecommunications standard, sets 150ms as the upper threshold for natural one-way voice quality. AI voice agents add three pipeline stages on top of this, each contributing its own voice agent latency budget. Microsoft’s AI agent performance…