Every Voice Agents comparison and buyer's guide for building AI agents — 4 pieces and counting. Each is a head-to-head or a “best X for Y” roundup with a sources-backed verdict.
The new realtime models hear and speak in one step, no text in the middle. That deletes the seam where you used to read, log, and control everything. Here's the real trade.
For a voice agent, the number that decides the experience isn't audio quality or even the vendor's model latency. It's production time-to-first-audio — and the gap between the two is where the choice actually lives.
Every "voice agent framework" comparison pretends these three are the same tool. They sit at three different layers of the stack, and picking by features instead of layer is how teams end up rewriting.
Whisper tops the accuracy leaderboard and loses the conversation. For a live voice agent, the number that decides whether the bot feels human isn't word error rate — it's who detects the end of your turn.