Latency in Voice AI: Why It Matters and How to Fix It

Voice AI has evolved from a novelty into an essential tool for accessibility and customer support. However, latency remains a critical issue, defined as the time between input and the first audible output in TTS or voice cloning. Simultaneously, industry data from Jellyfish, tracking 300,000 developers across 1,300 companies, suggests that while frontier model benchmarks and leaderboards dominate discussions, the model itself may not be the primary driver of AI transformation in daily software engineering workflows.