My voice-agent test now includes the 600-second cliff
Summary
The author describes a voice agent call cut off at 600 seconds without warning, and proposes a testing approach to handle max duration gracefully, including pre-cutoff warnings and state preservation.
Similar Articles
Scaling voice agents breaks in a different place at each layer — here's the one that usually caps you first
This article discusses the challenges of scaling voice agents, noting that failures occur at different layers, and identifies the most common bottleneck that limits performance first.
8 months running a voice agent in production: what broke, what fixed it, and the system prompt I use
A practitioner shares 8 months of experience running a voice agent for a law firm, detailing challenges like latency, turn-taking, and post-call workflows, and provides a working system prompt.
The smallest voice-agent test I like: make it ask the missing question
A simple test for voice agents: give an underspecified instruction (like 'use the address on file') and see if the agent asks for clarification before committing. The quality of the follow-up question reveals the agent's reliability.
6 months running a production voice agent for service businesses. The latency math is way harder than the demos suggest.
After 6 months running a voice AI agent for service businesses, the author reveals that real-world latency is bimodal (median ~800ms, p95 ~2.4s) and this p95 determines user perception. Issues like VAD misfires, function call degradation with long prompts, and TTS quality matter more than LLM choice, with multilingual support adding significant costs.
Red-teaming voice agents: audio as the attack surface, multi-turn pressure, and closing the loop
A deep dive into red-teaming voice agents, highlighting audio as an attack surface, the need for multi-turn testing, and practical baseline methodologies (1,200 calls) for pre-launch safety.