What Makes a Great Conversational AI Experience: Vapi on Voice Design

Vapi argues that voice agents are judged on five real-time dimensions: latency, turn-taking, interruption handling, prosody, and a resilient pipeline. It cites research putting human turn gaps near 200ms and notes delays beyond roughly 500–700ms feel unnatural, while naive sequential pipelines can cost about 1.9 seconds versus 600–900ms for optimized ones. Vapi positions its model-agnostic pipeline as tunable and testable via simulated calls.