Latency in Voice AI: Why milliseconds decide whether a call feels human

One of the biggest things people underestimate about AI voice agents is latency. A voice agent can have an incredibly realistic voice and a strong LLM, but if there’s a noticeable pause after every sentence, the conversation immediately feels artificial. In a normal phone conversation, people don't wait for a system to finish processing their words. They interrupt. They respond quickly. They change direction mid-sentence. That means a production voice AI agent has to coordinate several things in real time: speech-to-text intent and context processing LLM response generation tool calls text-to-speech telephony A delay anywhere in that chain can make the conversation feel awkward. This becomes even more important for AI customer support, AI sales calls, appointment setting, and outbound calling, where natural conversation directly affects whether someone stays on the call. I've been looking at different voice AI platforms, and Feather AI has been interesting because the focus is not just on generating a realistic voice, but on the underlying infrastructure required to run real-time AI phone conversations. Curious what others are seeing in production. At what latency does a voice AI agent start feeling noticeably less human to you?