⏭️ Forward Deployed: Voice AI on what works in 2026

A voice assistant must decide when a person has finished speaking before it can answer naturally. Unlike a text chat, there is usually no send button marking the end of a message. The engineering panel explains why detecting silence alone is insufficient: a pause halfway through a sentence is different from a completed request.

In the pipeline described, speech recognition converts audio to text, a language model prepares a response and speech synthesis reads it aloud. Turn detection helps determine when to hand the conversation from the caller to the assistant. Panelists also describe a tradeoff between more intelligent responses and lower latency, which is a separate design choice from detecting the end of a turn.