Reading up on Pipecat

ServiceNow's EVA framework jointly evaluates voice agents on task accuracy and conversational experience, revealing a consistent accuracy-experience tradeoff across 20 systems.

Async Developer Platform launches a low-latency TTS API with voice cloning, 15+ languages, and pricing starting at $0.50/hour, claiming faster response times than ElevenLabs and Cartesia.

A developer built a sub-500ms latency voice agent by co-locating and aggressively pipelining STT, LLM, and TTS stages. Commenters debate trade-offs vs. end-to-end models, endpoint detection alternatives, and the difficulty of human-like turn-taking.

Developers find that truly local, low-latency speech-to-speech AI is not yet achievable with end-to-end open models, so the best 2026 setups combine streaming ASR, LLM, and TTS on a single GPU using frameworks like Pipecat.