Real-Time Voice Companion

Realtime voice is easy to demo and hard to make comfortable. The hardest issue here was self-interruption: the app's own voice coming out of a phone speaker was picked up by its own microphone, and the system treated that as the user interrupting.

A cough in the room could stop it mid-sentence.

Several detection settings were tried — different voice-activity modes, sensitivity thresholds, and far-field noise reduction. Each reduced the problem; none removed it, because the microphone stays open while the model speaks and no server-side setting fully solves that.

The reliable fix was a mute control the user holds. Not clever, but it works every time, which the clever options did not.

That is worth stating plainly: the honest answer was a simpler interface, not a better parameter.