I'm building a voice app and need speech-to-text plus low-latency responses

For a voice app, you’ll usually want:

1. Speech-to-text (STT) for transcribing user audio
2. Low-latency response generation for quick turn-taking
3. Optional text-to-speech (TTS) if you want spoken replies

Practical architecture

A common low-latency setup is:

• Audio stream from client
• Streaming STT to get partial and final transcripts
• LLM response triggered as soon as you have enough text
• Streaming TTS back to the client for fast audio playback

What to optimize for

• End-to-end latency
• Partial transcripts
• Interruptibility / barge-in
• Noise handling
• Turn detection so the app knows when the user finished speaking

If you want the fastest experience

Use:

• Streaming STT
• Streaming model responses
• Chunked/streaming TTS
• WebSockets or WebRTC for audio transport

Implementation tips

• Start processing on partial transcripts, not just final ones
• Keep the response model lightweight or use a fast model
• Use VAD (voice activity detection) to detect pauses
• Cache or prewarm connections if possible

If you want, I can help with one of these next:

• A recommended tech stack
• A reference architecture
• Sample code for streaming audio → STT → response
• A comparison of providers/tools for low-latency voice apps