Articles tagged “latency”
19 articles
Reasoning models for CX agents: when to think slow, when to move fast
Extended thinking models improve decision quality for complex CX scenarios, but add 5-30 seconds of latency and cost 3-5x more. Here's the planning-execution architecture that gets you the benefit without the tradeoff.
On-device AI agents for CX: what edge deployment unlocks
On-device AI agents are no longer a research project. Here's what running your CX agent on local hardware actually unlocks in 2026, and what it doesn't.
Agent warmup: preload customer context before the first word
Most agents ask for information they already have. Here's how to preload the right customer context before an interaction starts, so your agent sounds like it knows the customer from word one.
Extended thinking for CX agents: when slow beats fast
Reasoning models (Claude Opus 4.7, o3, Qwen 3) let your agent think through complex problems before acting. For some CX tasks that's a major improvement. For others, it's a 4-second pause before telling someone their order ships Thursday.
Tool result caching: the latency and cost wins hiding in your stack
Your agent re-fetches the same data on every call. Tool result caching cuts latency by up to 70% and inference costs by 40-60% with changes that take days, not weeks. Here's how to classify, implement, and measure it.
Parallel tool calls: the 5x speedup in your agent
Sequential tool calls compound latency for no reason. Here's how to fan out independent tool calls in parallel and cut agent response time by up to 5x in production.
Prompt caching: the cost cut most agent teams skip
Prompt caching cuts API costs 41-80% and TTFT by up to 31%. Learn where to put the cache breakpoint, when it backfires, and how to monitor hit rates in production.
Pre-Execute Tool Calls to Cut Agent Latency 48%
Sequential tool calls quietly kill your agent's response time. PASTE shows you can pre-execute likely tool calls during LLM thinking time and cut latency 48% without touching your model.
Your voice agent's P95 is lying. The real problem is P99.9
Per-stage P95 hides the tail customers feel. How variance compounds across STT, LLM, and TTS, and how to SLO the joint distribution.
Everyone Benchmarks Opus. Your Chatbot Runs on Haiku.
Haiku 4.5, GPT-5 Mini, Gemini Flash at the $1/MTok tier that powers CX. Tool-call accuracy, first-token latency, structured-output reliability, blended cost math.
Pipecat vs LiveKit: the trade-offs that lock you in
An opinionated comparison of Pipecat and LiveKit for production voice agents, covering architecture, deployment, cost, and the trade-offs that lock you in.
Voice AI pipeline: STT, LLM, TTS and the 300ms budget
Build a real-time voice pipeline with Pipecat. How STT, LLM, and TTS stream concurrently under a 300ms latency budget, with turn detection and interruptions.
The Buffering Bug That Quietly Breaks Voice Agent Latency
SSE streams fine locally, then tokens batch into 500ms bursts in production. Here's why, how to fix it, and why pipeline parallelism matters more than model speed.
Voice Agent Platform Architecture: The Stack Behind Sub-300ms Responses
Deep dive into voice agent architecture — the STT→LLM→TTS pipeline, latency budgets, interruption handling, WebRTC vs WebSocket transport, and what orchestration platforms leave on the table.
Real-Time Monitoring for AI Agents: What to Watch and When to Panic
What dashboards actually matter for production AI agents. Alert fatigue, anomaly detection, and the metrics that predict failures before customers notice.
Edge AI for Voice Agents: Fix Latency and Privacy at the Source
How edge AI eliminates 50-200ms of latency and entire classes of privacy risks for voice agents — with hybrid architecture patterns and TypeScript examples.
Sub-300ms Voice AI: The New Standard That's Redefining Customer Expectations
Discover why sub-300ms response times have become the new standard in voice AI, backed by cognitive science research and real-world deployment data.
Performance Benchmarks for AI Agents: What Actually Matters Beyond Word Error Rate
Most enterprises obsess over Word Error Rate while missing the metrics that actually predict success. Here's what to measure instead.
Why Voice AI Latency Past One Second Tanks Satisfaction
Each second of voice AI latency measurably erodes customer satisfaction. Here's how to measure, budget, and cut delay across the ASR, LLM, and TTS pipeline.
Learn Agentic AI
Weekly. Patterns for shipping agents that work. MCP, scorecards, regression tests, prompts, model comparisons.
