Metrics

What is Latency?

Latency, in voice AI, is the delay between a caller finishing speaking and the agent beginning to reply.

Also called: response latency, conversational latency

It is the single most noticeable quality signal on a call. Human conversation has gaps of roughly 200 milliseconds; anything beyond about two seconds reads as a bad line or a machine, and callers start talking over the agent or hang up. Total latency is the sum of speech recognition, model inference and speech synthesis, so a slow component anywhere shows up as an awkward pause.

Caller stops speakingAgent repliesSTT≤400msLLM≤700msTTS≤350ms~1.4s end-to-end budget (p95)
Why it matters

Outpero targets under 1.4 seconds. Latency, more than vocabulary or accent, determines whether callers stay on the line.

What is Latency?

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Latency, in voice AI, is the delay between a caller finishing speaking and the agent beginning to reply. It is the single most noticeable quality signal on a call. Human conversation has gaps of roughly 200 milliseconds; anything beyond about two seconds reads as a bad line or a machine, and callers start talking over the agent or hang up. Total latency is the sum of speech recognition, model inference and speech synthesis, so a slow component anywhere shows up as an awkward pause.

Why does Latency matter?

+

Outpero targets under 1.4 seconds. Latency, more than vocabulary or accent, determines whether callers stay on the line.

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