The 800ms Barrier: Architecting Interruptible Voice Agents (Lessons from Sarvam AI x Swiggy)

The Signal: The 800ms Latency Barrier

In a research lab, a 3-second delay is an "optimization ticket." In a live call with a hungry customer on the Swiggy app, 3 seconds is a churn event.

The partnership between Sarvam AI and Swiggy represents a shift in the "Boss Level" of agentic AI. Most developers build voice agents using a Cascaded Pipeline: STT -> LLM -> TTS. The result? A cumulative lag that makes the agent feel like a slow walkie-talkie. To build for the next billion users, you have to architect for Native Audio Streaming and sub-second response times.

Phase 1: The Architectural Bet

We are moving from Request-Response to Streaming State Machines.

The Vendor Trap is relying on general-purpose, text-centric models for a multilingual, audio-first market.…