Fewer hops means lower latency and better prosody, at the cost of control over each stage.

  • A cascaded agent gives a transcript, interchangeable providers and control over each stage — easier to inspect and repair.
  • An end-to-end speech model can preserve tone and overlap while removing network hops, but it is harder to constrain, evaluate and debug.
  • Not simply old versus new. The right choice depends on whether control or natural conversational behaviour matters more for the product.

Connections