Realtime Models vs Pipelines

Choose the right architecture

Compare realtime speech-to-speech models with traditional STT→LLM→TTS pipelines. Understand tradeoffs, use cases, and hybrid approaches.

Side-by-side comparison app with both pipeline and realtime implementations of the same agent, with latency and quality metrics.

Chapters

Pipeline (STT→LLM→TTS) vs realtime (speech-to-speech) — architecture, latency, and capability tradeoffs.

Build a pipeline agent with optimized model selection and latency tuning.

Implement a realtime agent using OpenAI's Realtime API with GPT-4o.

Implement a realtime agent using Google's Gemini Live for multimodal conversations.

Build hybrid architectures that switch between pipeline and realtime based on context.

Measure and compare latency, quality, and cost across pipeline and realtime approaches.

A decision framework for choosing between pipeline, realtime, and hybrid architectures.

Clear understanding of when to use pipeline vs realtime models, how to implement both, and how to build hybrid architectures.