I swapped the TTS in my voice agent and it cut the lag people actually feel more than anything else

Reddit r/AI_Agents Models
voice-agent text-to-speech bilingual arabic english code-switching lag

Summary

The author shares their experience swapping the TTS in their voice agent to a custom model (Banter 1) designed for bilingual Arabic-English conversations, which significantly reduced perceived lag.

I have been building Banter 1, a text to speech model aimed at voice agents that need Arabic and English in the same conversation. The reason I started: most stacks I tried nailed English and then treated Arabic as an afterthought, so it came out flat, mispronounced, or in the wrong dialect, and code switching mid sentence fell apart. I would rather hear where it breaks than where it shines, so if you build bilingual agents: how are you handling this today, and does mine actually hold up against what you use? Separate voices per language or one model for both?
Original Article

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