▶ Watch ↗AI Engineer World's Fair 202632:57
Designing Voice Agents for Real Conversations
Read the full talk →Key ideas
Scroll to read ↓A voice agent needs to know when to speak and when to stop. Three Pipecat configurations show how silence timers, provider events and local turn models make those decisions.
- The same correction, two different conversations1:44 ↗
- Why a short delay feels long2:37 ↗
- Turn-taking surrounds the generation pipeline3:54 ↗
- Level one: let silence end the turn5:17 ↗
- Level two: let the STT provider signal completion8:27 ↗
- Level three: a local model with a silence safety net9:55 ↗
- Fast cancellation still needs an intent decision11:35 ↗
- Three configurations of the same Python pipeline13:14 ↗
- Where the response budget goes14:55 ↗
- A fast median cannot hide a slow conversational turn18:16 ↗
- Turn errors become operational problems19:56 ↗
- A travel assistant makes the policy visible21:46 ↗
- The silence timer mistakes hesitation for completion25:01 ↗
- The provider waits for Sydney26:21 ↗
- The logs distinguish model completion from a timeout29:30 ↗