i-LAVA: Insights on Low Latency Voice-2-Voice Architecture for Agents

We experiment with a low-latency, end-to-end voice-to-voice communication model to optimize it for real-time conversational applications. By analyzing components essential to voice to voice (V-2-V) system viz. automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and dialog management, our work analyzes how to reduce processing time while maintaining high-quality interactions to identify the levers for optimizing V-2-V system. Our work identifies that TTS component which generates life-like voice, full of emotions including natural pauses and exclamations has highest impact on Real time factor (RTF). The experimented V-2-V architecture utilizes CSM1b has the capability to understand tone as well as context of conversation by ingesting both audio and text of prior exchanges to generate contextually accurate speech. We explored optimization of Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) iterations by the TTS decoder which come at a cost of decrease in the quality of voice generated. Our experimental evaluations also demonstrate that for V-2-V implementations based on CSM most important optimizations can be brought by reducing the number of RVQ Iterations along with the codebooks used in Mimi.