Dev Tools · 2h ago
Voice Agent Latency Hidden Between Spans, Not in Them
A 1.4-second dead air gap in a voice agent call was invisible to APM dashboards because it occurred between spans, not within them. The gap between turn-end and ASR-start is unattributed time that standard tracing misses. Engineers must instrument handoffs, not just components, to catch UX-breaking latency.
Meridian48 take
This is a sharp reminder that observability tools designed for request-response APIs fail for real-time voice pipelines, where the gaps between services matter more than the services themselves.
observabilityvoice-agents