Voice Is the Hardest Channel
Text-based agents get a lot of attention, but voice is where the real operational leverage is. It's also where the failure modes are most painful. A 2-second delay in a chat feels fine. A 2-second silence on a phone call feels like the system is broken.
Latency Budgets Matter
We target sub-800ms response times for voice agents on ServoAgent. That budget gets split across:
- Speech-to-text: ~150ms with streaming transcription
- Agent reasoning: ~400ms with optimized model routing
- Text-to-speech: ~200ms with pre-cached common responses
Every millisecond matters. We pre-warm connections, cache frequent intents, and use speculative execution for predictable conversation flows.
Fallback Strategies
No agent gets it right 100% of the time. The difference between a good voice agent and a bad one is what happens when confidence drops. Our agents use a tiered fallback system:
- Clarification prompt (high confidence the user can rephrase)
- Deterministic routing to a specific handler
- Warm transfer to a human agent with full context
Deterministic Routing Still Matters
Not everything should go through the LLM. Payment confirmations, account lookups, and compliance-sensitive flows use deterministic routing — no model in the loop. The agent orchestrator decides when to use AI reasoning and when to use hard-coded logic. This keeps costs down and reliability up.