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Voice

Voice agent, native speech-to-speech

One multimodal model listens and speaks; the lowest latency and the most natural tone.

Use it when

Conversational experiences where naturalness matters more than fine control, and the provider's voices and languages fit your audience.

Structure

The parts, top to bottom

hover a part to see its job

across every level

Hover or tap any part to see what it does. The light shows the order a request moves through.

Flow

What happens, in order

  1. 1Audio stream in
  2. 2Realtime model reasons in speech
  3. 3Tool calls for data & actions
  4. 4Audio stream out
  5. 5Guardrails on transcript
  6. 6Handoff when needed
Tools

What we typically build it with

OpenAI Realtime APIGemini LiveLiveKitTwilio

Trade-offs

The most natural prosody and the fewest moving parts, but fewer vendor choices and harder to swap voices or models independently. Realtime audio is billed per audio token (typically $0.06–0.11 per minute in measured sessions), so we model cost at volume and often pair it with a cascaded fallback.

What we solve

Problems this architecture solves

Generic problem statements with the flow and the outcomes the industry has documented.

Voice agent

Calls missed, callers on hold

Clinics, dealerships and service businesses lose bookings after hours and during peaks. IVR menus frustrate callers and staff repeat the same ten conversations all day.

How the system works

  1. Call arrives
  2. Streaming speech-to-text
  3. Agent reasons & checks calendar / CRM
  4. Streaming text-to-speech
  5. Book, confirm, hand off
Twilio / LiveKitDeepgramElevenLabs / CartesiaOpenAI / GeminiPipecat / Vapi

Outcome: Voice agents replacing IVR resolve a majority of qualified calls automatically (66% at one Parloa customer) and cut wait times by a third or more, at turn latencies under a second. Parloa customer results

Architecture
Related

Other voice patterns

Voice

Voice agent, cascaded pipeline

Telephony → speech-to-text → agent with tools → text-to-speech, tuned for sub-second turns.

Use it when: Phone or in-app voice for bookings, support, collections and outbound reminders, where you need control over the model, the tools and the voice, and clear logs of what was said.

Flow

  1. 1Call via SIP / WebRTC
  2. 2Voice activity detection
  3. 3Streaming speech-to-text
  4. 4Agent reasons & calls tools
  5. 5Streaming text-to-speech

Let's build intelligent systems that drive growth

Tachyon is the engineering partner for teams that need AI in production, not in a deck. Start with a free 60-minute discovery call.

Contact

Tell us the problem, we will map it to the architecture

Every great partnership begins with a conversation. Whether you are exploring possibilities or ready to scale, tell us what you are actually trying to build.

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Book a call

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