Building Production-Grade Real-Time AI Voice Conversations

Real-time voice AI requires handling interruptions, speech chunking, and call endings differently than text chat. Key patterns include using AbortController to cancel in-flight streams when users interrupt, combining interrupted messages to preserve context, buffering words into chunks (2 words initially, 4 words after) for natural speech flow, detecting sentence endings while avoiding abbreviation false positives, and letting the AI signal call termination with markers. The 300ms latency threshold and unpredictable network conditions make voice AI significantly less forgiving than text-based systems.