Build a phone voice agent that answers in under half a second
Observed in the wild: a voice agent transmitting speech-to-text, LLM, and clean barge-ins with an average averaging of roughly 400ms from start to finish.
- Agent or tool
- Custom agent
- Topic
- Productivity
- Reported on
- Hacker News
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Small, repetitive tasks eat more of the week than anyone likes to admit. Cases like this show an agent taking a chore off someone's plate end to end, not just suggesting what to do. It is one of 196 sightings filed under Productivity on Agent Sightings (number 165 by interest), and one of 182 involving Custom agent.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into your own agent or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
Help me build a phone voice agent that answers in under half a second. Break it into steps, show your work, and wait for confirmation before anything irreversible, paid, or outbound.
Tip: Start small: run it once on a low-stakes example, read what the agent did, and only then let it run on real work.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224295. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.