Voice AI in 2026: The Complete Stack From Whisper to Speaker

ASR, LLM, TTS - How to Wire Them Into a Single Low-Latency Pipeline Every week someone asks me the same question: “I want to build a voice AI agent. Where do I start?” The answer used to be complicated. You needed to stitch together six different services, manage WebSocket connections, handle audio encoding, deal with silence detection - and somehow make it all feel real-time. In 2026, the stack has matured. The pieces fit together better. But the documentation hasn’t caught up. Most tutorials show you how to call Whisper or ElevenLabs in isolation.