Adding AssemblyAI to an existing voice stack: shadow-test, measure, cut over

AssemblyAI presents Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime as a speech-to-text component that can replace an existing provider in voice-agent platforms such as LiveKit, Pipecat, Vapi, Retell, or custom streaming systems without changing the surrounding LLM, tools, prompts, telephony, or orchestration logic. It recommends a staged migration: fork live audio to run AssemblyAI alongside the current provider for roughly a week, compare transcripts, entity capture, latency, turn behavior, and downstream LLM responses, then deploy behind a feature flag to a small share of calls with a simple rollback path. The post argues that entity accuracy for items such as names, IDs, phone numbers, and dates is often more consequential than aggregate word error rate, and highlights features including conversational context carryover, multilingual code-switching, and configurable key terms. It also describes technical streaming requirements, platform-specific configuration changes, optional evaluation of AssemblyAI’s text-to-speech service as a separate experiment, and a more substantial migration path for teams moving from OpenAI’s fused speech-to-speech Realtime API to a modular speech, language-model, and synthesis pipeline.

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