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LiveKit Blog·· 2026-09-09AI score22

What "inference is slower than realtime" means in LiveKit voice agents

What does "inference is slower than realtime" mean?

AI summary

LiveKit explains that the "inference is slower than realtime" warning in its voice agents refers to the local VAD model, not the STT, TTS, or LLM models used through LiveKit Inference. Each 32ms audio window must be processed in under 32ms, and the reported delay shows how far the VAD has fallen behind live audio. Blocked event loops and CPU saturation are the main causes, and the fix is to rule out synchronous code rather than add threads.

Source:LiveKit Blog · livekit.com