AI Voice Employee
A real-time conversational AI system combining audio streaming, speech processing, RAG, tool calling, and agent workflows for customer-facing interactions.
Open-source engineering system and architectural prototype. No fabricated client metrics.
01 / THE PROBLEM
Voice-based AI systems frequently struggle with awkward latencies (>1.5s), turn-taking collisions, lack of situational context, and inability to interact with real business tools during live dialogue.
02 / APPROACH & WHY I BUILT IT
Constructed as a high-performance demonstration and prototype to validate ultra-low-latency bidirectional voice interactions with tool-calling and real-time knowledge retrieval.
Utilizes a streaming WebSocket architecture. Incoming PCM audio frames pass through Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and fast speech-to-text. The conversational agent processes streamed tokens, decides on tool calls or RAG lookups asynchronously, and streams token outputs into an audio synthesis pipeline for sub-second responses.
03 / HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS
- 01.Captures bidirectional audio via WebSockets or WebRTC stream.
- 02.Applies client-side and server-side VAD to reliably detect user interruptions and conversational pauses.
- 03.Orchestrates speech-to-text transcription with continuous contextual buffering.
- 04.Executes domain tool lookups (CRM records, appointment availability, documentation search) during agent thinking loops.
- 05.Streams synthesized voice chunks back to the client with minimal time-to-first-audio (TTFA).
04 / KEY ENGINEERING DECISIONS
- ✦Barge-in / interruption handling: Immediately terminates outbound audio streaming and cancels downstream LLM generation when user speech is detected.
- ✦Chunked streaming TTS: Generates speech in sentence and phrase chunks to deliver audio while subsequent tokens are still being computed.
- ✦Asynchronous tool pre-fetching: Initiates tool calls concurrently with dialogue generation whenever intent confidence crosses threshold.
05 / RELIABILITY & FAILURE BOUNDARIES
Features automatic audio buffer backpressure management, graceful fallback to standard responses during network jitter, and circuit-broken external tool integrations.