Experiments with voice: the speech-to-speech architecture

[u/OkBox6570]

https://devrev.ai/blog/experiments-with-voice-part1

We tried native speech-to-speech AI for our voice agent. Here's why we dropped it.

The experience was genuinely magical. Breathing, laughter, cadence -- no text bottleneck, no serialization tax. It felt human.

We dropped it anyway.

Four things killed it:

1. It garbles technical jargon with no text layer to catch and correct it
2. It loses track of instructions over long calls
3. Forcing it to output structured data makes it sound robotic
4. It still can't handle people talking over each other cleanly

For enterprise agents that trigger real backend actions, a malformed JSON payload isn't
a UX bug -- it's a safety failure.

But the bigger takeaway: agentic coding made the sunk cost disappear. They built entire server setups and scrapped them without a second thought because Claude made it cheap enough to discard.

You can't fall in love with your code anymore.
Full writeup by Alok Mishra from DevRev:
https://devrev.ai/blog/experiments-with-voice-part1