How to Build a Sub-500ms Voice Agent From Scratch: A Deep Dive
I have enough from the main article. Let me write the blog post now. How to Build a Sub-500ms Voice Agent From Scratch: A Deep Dive TL;DR A developer built a fully functional voice agent with under 500ms end-to-end latency in roughly one day using ~$100 in API credits. The key breakthroughs: switching from OpenAI to Groq for inference (cutting first-token latency from 300–500ms down to ~80ms), pre-warming WebSocket connections to ElevenLabs, and deploying in the EU instead of running locally. The full code is open source. This is one of the most practical, honest breakdowns of real-time voice AI architecture published so far. ...