Retell AI Known Pitfalls

Overview

Real gotchas when building voice AI agents with Retell AI. Retell handles telephony, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech in a WebSocket pipeline -- latency sensitivity and audio-specific failure modes require different thinking than typical REST APIs.

Prerequisites

• Retell AI API key and agent configured
• Understanding of WebSocket-based communication
• Awareness of telephony concepts (PSTN, SIP)

Instructions

Step 1: Manage Voice Latency Budget

Retell pipelines must respond in under 1 second for natural conversation. Your webhook response time is part of that budget.