😺 Watch LIVE NOW: Building AI Voice Agents w/ LiveKit's Ben Cherry

2026-05-14 · Source: The Neuron · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Software Development & Engineering, Robotics & Autonomous Systems · Depth: Intermediate, medium

Summary

The Neuron announced a live stream on May 21, 2026, featuring Ben Cherry from LiveKit, focusing on building real-time AI voice agents. The discussion will cover challenges like latency, interruptions, audio quality, and turn-taking, differentiating polished demos from production-ready solutions, and include a live demonstration. Additionally, the brief highlighted three recent interviews: Tudor Achim of Harmonic discussed Aristotle, an AI for machine-checkable mathematical proofs; Becky Paul and Michael Schaarschmidt from Isomorphic Labs detailed their AI for designing medicines, a Google DeepMind spinout behind AlphaFold (2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry); Danny Wu from Canva shared insights on their AI design tools, used 24 billion times, which generate layered, editable assets; and Yaron Inger of Lightricks presented LTX-2, an open-source video model downloaded 4.5 million times in two months, enabling local video editing on consumer GPUs.

Key takeaway

For AI Engineers developing real-time voice agents, understanding the complexities beyond basic conversational AI is crucial. You should prioritize addressing latency, handling interruptions, and ensuring high audio quality to transition from a demo to a production-ready system. Explore LiveKit's approach to gain practical insights into these critical factors and evaluate how they impact user experience and agent utility.

Key insights

Building effective real-time AI voice agents demands addressing latency, interruptions, and audio quality for production viability.

Topics

• AI Voice Agents
• Real-time AI
• LiveKit
• AI Drug Discovery
• AI Design
• AI Video Generation

Code references

• Lightricks/LTX-Desktop

Best for: AI Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, Director of AI/ML

Related on AIssential

• Voice Agent Use Cases — Voice agents require sophisticated multi-model architectures to overcome inherent complexities and deliver reliable, low-latency, and context-aware interactions.
• Why Emotion Matters More Than Sound — Building production-grade voice AI agents requires overcoming significant application-layer challenges beyond basic LLM integration.
• Perplexity with LiveKit Agents - Perplexity — The `livekit-plugins-perplexity` package enables LiveKit Agents to use Perplexity's web-grounded LLMs.
• Angelos Perivolaropoulos of ElevenLabs at RAAIS 2026 — Real-world voice AI demands balancing high speech-to-text accuracy with critical low-latency performance for effective interactive systems.
• The Real State of Voice Agents: Lessons from Founders Who've Deployed Millions of Calls — Successful voice agent deployment requires clear business objectives, robust technical redundancy, and continuous post-call quality assurance.
• Voice for AI Agents and Applications — Voice integration into AI agents is simplified through structured patterns, overcoming past latency and reliability hurdles.

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by The Neuron.