Design a Real-Time AI Voice System
Company: Decagon
Role: Software Engineer
Category: ML System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a real-time AI voice system, such as a phone or web-based voice agent that can listen to a user, understand the conversation, generate a response, and speak back naturally.
Discuss the end-to-end architecture from audio ingestion through speech recognition, dialogue orchestration, response generation, speech synthesis, session state, interruption handling, safety, observability, latency, and cost. Focus on the engineering design rather than only the model choice.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system-level engineering skills for real-time conversational AI, covering audio ingestion, speech recognition, dialogue orchestration, response generation, speech synthesis, session state, interruption handling, safety, observability, latency, and cost, and is categorized under ML system design and speech systems.