5 Voice Agent Failure Modes You'll Hit in Week One — Venky B, Plivo
Venky B from Plivo, which handles over a billion calls per month, presents five critical problems that hit voice-based AI agents when moving from demo to production.
First is latency: users hang up if the agent takes longer than 550 milliseconds to respond, while most systems land between 750 and 1,200 milliseconds. His solution is smaller open source models self-hosted to achieve under 300 milliseconds. Second is that transcription is brittle by default, especially with proper nouns and code-switched languages. Third is data collection: instead of treating everything as flowing text, structure it as typed form fields with validators, which raised his accuracy from around 30 percent to the mid-nineties without extra training. Fourth is normalizing text before converting it to speech, and fifth covers turn-taking and barge-in in conversations.
Vibekollen prepared this summary with AI from the original publication. The content belongs to AI Engineer.
