Voice AI Latency: Why Sub-Second Responses Decide Whether Prospects Hang Up

1Key Takeaways

• Voice AI latency is the gap between the moment a caller stops speaking and the moment the AI agent's reply becomes audible.
• Human conversation sets a demanding baseline: across ten languages, the most common turn-to-turn gap was 0 ms and the cross-language mean was about +208 ms (Stivers et al., PNAS, 2009).
• Listener research on simulated phone calls found that perceived willingness What this covers Why milliseconds decide sales calls The human baseline: how fast people actually take turns….