We dropped Go for Rust in our real-time telephony AI media plane

Description

In building Vivik, an execution-grade telephony AI engine, we faced a brutal constraint: the human conversational loop. In psychoacoustics, a delay under 250 ms feels instantaneous. At 500 ms, users notice lag. Beyond 800 ms, conversations start feeling strained, and by 1.5 seconds, the illusion of real-time interaction collapses. That creates an extremely tight latency budget for voice AI: • Network RTT: 50–200 ms • LLM inference: 200–800 ms • TTS synthesis: 100–400 ms • ASR processing: 1