Most voice AI teams delay this decision far longer than they should - and eventually hit the same wall. The LLM ends up being the single biggest driver of both latency and cost.

The solutions teams reach for are usually workarounds: • Racing multiple LLM endpoints and taking the fastest response (works, but expensive) • Cron jobs that monitor response times and hot-swap providers • Hosted OSS via Fireworks or Baseten (useful as a bridge, rarely the destination)