Ring buffer and audio streaming
REAL-TIME MULTIMODAL AI — PART 1/5 Day 1: The Acoustic Frontier — Full-Duplex Audio Streaming, PCM Ring Buffers, WebSockets vs. WebRTC & Silero VAD 25 min read Series: The Dharma of Development Multimodal AI (Day 1 / 5) Level: Principal / Real-Time AI Systems Architect š️ Context: Text-based chat interfaces are forgiving: if an LLM takes 1.5 seconds to emit its first token, the user barely notices. But human voice conversation operates under ruthless biological constraints. In natural human dialogue, the average gap between one person finishing a sentence and the other responding is 200 to 300 milliseconds . Anything above 800 milliseconds feels robotic, awkward, and broken. When engineers build their first voice agent, they often record a complete `.wav` file on the client, upload it over an HTTP POST request, run batch transcription, query an LLM, synthesize speech, and download the response—resulting in a painful 4-to-6-second latency stall . Worse, if the...
