Challenges in Building Natural, Low‑Latency, Reliable Voice Assistants

Natural, reliable voice assistants require voice‑only turn‑taking, sub‑300 millisecond latency, concise answers, instant interruption handling, background‑speech filtering, offline resilience, and power efficiency. Build them with an end‑to‑end streaming pipeline (automatic speech recognition (ASR) → natural language understanding (NLU) → text‑to‑speech (TTS)), anchored on an on‑device first hop, strong caching and speculation, and weekly service level objectives for Word Error Rate (WER), end‑of‑speech to first‑audio p95/p99, task success, brevity, and power.