Fast ASR for voice agents: bring your own turn detection

The discussion centers around the strategic decision of whether to use built-in turn detection from streaming speech-to-text (STT) providers or to implement custom voice-activity detection (VAD) for voice agents, highlighting the benefits and trade-offs of each approach. Teams that have fine-tuned their own VAD systems may prefer to bypass the built-in turn detection of streaming models, opting instead for the speed and control of a synchronous HTTP approach to return transcripts quickly and accurately after a turn ends, minimizing latency in the conversation flow. This enables these teams to keep control over the conversation dynamics and maintain high transcript accuracy, which is crucial for the effectiveness of language models in processing user input. Meanwhile, teams that prioritize ease and speed of deployment might choose built-in solutions, which offer integrated turn detection and mid-utterance streaming capabilities, albeit with less control over the endpointing process. The decision ultimately hinges on whether the priority is maintaining control over the conversation loop or achieving quick deployment with pre-configured solutions.

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