Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

Re:Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scr... by lukax on Monday March 02, 2026 @05:25PM (#47225053)

Or you could use Soniox Real-time (supports 60 languages) which natively supports endpoint detection - the model is trained to figure out when a user's turn ended. This always works better than VAD.

https://soniox.com/docs/stt/rt/endpoint-detection

Soniox also wins the independent benchmarks done by Daily, the company behind Pipecat.

https://www.daily.co/blog/benchmarking-stt-for-voice-agents/

You can try a demo on the home page:

https://soniox.com/

Disclaimer: I used to work for Soniox

Edit: I commented too soon. I only saw VAD and immediately thought of Soniox which was the first service to implement real time endpoint detection last year.

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Re:Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scr... by nicktikhonov on Monday March 02, 2026 @05:29PM (#47225089)

If you read the post, you'll see that I used Deepgram's Flux. It also does endpointing and is a higher-level abstraction than VAD.

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Re:Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scr... by lukax on Monday March 02, 2026 @05:37PM (#47225181)

Sorry, I commented too soon. Did you also try Soniox? Why did you decide to use Deepgram's Flux (English only)?

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Re:Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scr... by nicktikhonov on Monday March 02, 2026 @05:41PM (#47225234)

I didn't try Soniox, but I made a note to check it out! I chose Flux because I was already using Deepgram for STT and just happened to discover it when I was doing research. It would definitely be a good follow-up to try out all the different endpointing solutions to see what would shave off additional latency and feel most natural.

Another good follow-up would be to try PersonaPlex, Nvidia's new model that would completely replace this architecture with a single model that does everything:

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/personaplex/

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Re:Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scr... by satvikpendem on Monday March 02, 2026 @09:54PM (#47227376)

I second Soniox as well, as a user. It really does do way better than Deepgram and others. If your app architecture is good enough then maybe replacing providers shouldn't be too hard.

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Re:Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scr... by satvikpendem on Monday March 02, 2026 @09:54PM (#47227379)

I'm using them, how has it been like working there? I see they have some consumer products as well. I wonder how they get state of the art for such low prices over the competition.

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