Your Voice Agent is Just a Walkie-Talkie

Everyone says cascaded voice pipelines are dead and native speech models are the future. Yet production environments are still dominated by STT-LLM-TTS stacks. Reconciling the natural flow of native audio with the elite reasoning of a cascaded agent remains an unsolved systems problem. This talk dissects the brutal technical trade-offs behind that counterintuitive reality. We will break down why your voice agent is still stuck behaving like a walkie-talkie and map out the specific technical roadmap required to build full-duplex AI that actually works.