Latency Is a Budget. Humanlike Is the Goal. — Jesse Hall, LiveKit

This talk addresses the critical gap between measured latency and perceived latency in voice AI pipelines, arguing that humanlike interaction requires a focus on perceived latency and a 'latency budget.' It highlights how errors compound across pipeline stages (STT, LLM, TTS) and introduces audio-based turn detection for more natural conversation flow. The talk proposes a target of ~600ms for humanlike feel and introduces LiveKit's open-source benchmark and a voice-tuned Gemma model for optimizing these pipelines.