We’ll explore three popular architectural patterns for voice agents, highlighting their trade-offs and best practices for minimizing latency.

Before diving deeper into the architecture patterns, here’s a quick overview of the three key components used as the sample solution in this post.

Amazon Nova Sonic is a foundation model that creates natural, human-like speech-to-speech conversations for generative AI applications. Users can interact with AI through voice in real time, with capabilities for understanding tone, natural conversational flow, and performing actions.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime is a serverless hosting environment for AI agents. You package your agent as a container, deploy to AgentCore Runtime, and it handles scaling, session isolation, and billing. For voice agents, it provides bidirectional WebSocket streaming with SigV4 auth, microVM-level session isolation to avoid noisy-neighbor latency spikes, AgentCore Gateway for shared tool hosting using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) open source protocol, persistent memory across sessions, and telemetry for voice-specific metrics like time-to-first-audio.