Nick
Nick avatar
My third ever time hitting HN front page!
Cast image embed
How I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch | Nick Tikhonov
ntik.me
How I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch | Nick Tikhonov
5
3
33
Nick avatar
got codex working on the same prompt for an hour now 👀 that's a personal record for me, all tests passing so far.
Cast image embed
1
11
Nick avatar
having a lot of fun with my BitClaw. I keep giving it new tools and tinkering with it's source code to modify its core behavior. some things it does for me, now on a regular basis: tracks workouts, gives nutrition advice manages my inbox, auto-archives spam schedules meetings, manages my calendar feeds granola transcr...
Cast image embed
5
2
22
Nick avatar
looking for work! open to consult and help you build AI products. I have experience in: - voice agents - recommendation systems - large-scale data/sentiment analysis - agents and harnesses
3
7
24
Nick avatar
built my own claw - 1.2k LOC (vs. openclaw's 400k and nanoclaw's 7k) - runs claude agent sdk in a container, so it's secure - all the core stuff working: memory, crons and heartbeat - it knows how to install and customise itself (just run claude in the dir) - talk to it on telegram, or just ask it to upgrade itself to...
GitHub - NickTikhonov/bitclaw: A functional, secure and self-building claw in under 1500 lines of code
github.com
GitHub - NickTikhonov/bitclaw: A functional, secure and self-building claw in under 1500 lines of code
60
2
183
Nick avatar
here's the app I've built to help me learn 60 new Chinese words every week. included: generate rich media flashcards, spaced repetition, AI sentence translation and a lot of nerdy stats (including a model of your memory!) slowly growing the beta - we have 4 active users now! I'm looking to onboard a few more. If you'r...
Cast video
18
1
92
Nick avatar
ok one project written up and wrapped up. now I want to build my own openclaw. I like openclaw, but I want to run my agent on my own machine, and there's no way I'm running openclaw on my own machine.
10
2
48
Nick avatar
built a SOTA voice agent from scratch in ~1 day. ended up beating off-the-shelf platforms by 2× on latency (~400ms e2e)
Building sub-500ms SOTA voice agents from scratch | Nick Tikhonov
ntik.me
Building sub-500ms SOTA voice agents from scratch | Nick Tikhonov
1
9
Nick avatar
my voice agent's e2e latency is now down to ~300ms, all thanks to Groq's insanely low TTFT endpoints (~100ms?!). this is 2-3x better than what you get off-the-shelf with the major providers
Cast image embed
2
17
Nick avatar
just beat Vapi's E2E latency with my own voice agent orchestrator! had to host everything just right to get the numbers this low Vapi's reported: ~840ms mine: ~690ms + 100ms (twilio) = ~790ms that 50ms is a big deal in getting AI voice convos to sound natural
Cast image embedCast image embed
22
24
229
Nick avatar
Mandarin progress update: I am 14% to B1 (conversational) - about 1 year away at the current pace. - I advance around 1.5% every week. - learned 97 core words last month - ~200 phrases/sentences learned last month 2x tutor sessions per week and daily flashcards + AI sentence translation exercises (roughly 100-150 per day)
Cast image embed
35
47
373
Nick avatar
my new recipe for learning and satisfying curiosities: if I see a really cool piece of tech, I'll try to build my own version (without looking at the source code). even for complicated stuff, it's now possible to figure things out with one weekend and a bunch of LLM credits. that's how you get deep down the stack and...
20
45
345
Nick avatar
this architecture gets you to a nearly SOTA voice agent (a la Vapi/ElevenLabs), but with much more control over the orchestration. Deepgram Flux handles STT and turn taking + a pipeline for LLM and TTS managed based on Flux events
Cast image embed
25
4
128
Nick avatar
the trick to making voice agents fast is pipelining everything: first pipeline: audio packets -> speech to text -> turn-taking model second: LLM -> text to speech -> encoding -> output here's a render of my current latency. bear in mind, I'm running this locally from a wooden hut in the mountains in Turkey - it shoul...
Cast image embed
62
27
375
Nick avatar
this is gonna suck to hear, but if you're feeling any strong emotions right now: you're definitely over-leveraged you'd do great next time if you take a note of this and adjust your priors for next time you buy/sell coins (or stocks, or any other type of investment)
27
23
232