Latency Is a Budget. Humanlike Is the Goal. — Jesse Hall, LiveKit
Source
youtube.com
Author
AI Engineer
Date
Why it matters
Gives concrete latency targets and a method for budgeting delay across speech-to-text, LLMA large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.Full definition → and text-to-speech stages. You can run the open-source benchmarkA standard public test set for comparing AI models — the shared scoreboards behind every "model X beats model Y" claim.Full definition → against your own voice AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition → instead of trusting model leaderboards.
Key takeaways · AI-distilled
LiveKit reports its audio-based turn detection cuts off 4.5% of users, versus 9.9% for the best alternative.
His latency window: about 1.5 seconds end to end still works, and around 600 milliseconds starts to feel human.
He separates measured latency from what callers actually hear, and recommends buying time while tools run, the way a person would.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.
benchmark — A standard public test set for comparing AI models — the shared scoreboards behind every "model X beats model Y" claim.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
