The End of HTTP: Why Morvoice Built a Native WebSocket Architecture for <70ms Latency

Kian R., VP of Engineering

11/15/2025

The 500ms Barrier

Let's be honest: Building a conversational AI agent in 2025 is easy. Building one that *doesn't* feel awkward is incredibly hard. The culprit? Latency. The human brain perceives a gap of >200ms in conversation as 'hesitation' or 'lag'. Most TTS (Text-to-Speech) providers rely on standard HTTP/2 REST APIs. This introduces a mandatory handshake overhead for every single turn of conversation.

The Anatomy of a Request: Where Competitors Fail

When you send a request to a legacy provider (e.g., ElevenLabs or OpenAI TTS), the following waterfall happens:

Legacy Flow (HTTP):
1. TCP Handshake (1-2 RTT)
2. TLS Negotiation (1-2 RTT)
3. Header Processing
4. Inference Queueing (Cold Start)
5. Audio Buffering (Wait for chunks)
6. Download Start
--> TOTAL: 350ms - 600ms (Optimistic)

This is unacceptable for real-time agents. By the time the audio starts playing, your user has already interrupted the bot. Morvoice took a different approach. We didn't just optimize the model; we rewrote the transport layer.

Introducing Morvoice Turbo-Socket™

We utilize persistent, bidirectional WebSocket connections tailored for streaming PCM audio (16-bit, 24kHz or 44.1kHz). Once the socket is open, the overhead for sending a new text token is effectively zero. We stream audio bytes *while* the inference engine is still calculating the end of the sentence.

// Morvoice Implementation (Zero-Overhead)
const socket = new MorvoiceSocket({ 
  apiKey: 'mv_live_...', 
  format: 'pcm_24000'
});

// The socket stays open. No handshakes between turns.
socket.on('data', (audioChunk) => player.feed(audioChunk));

// Send text instantly
socket.send("The latency here is undetectable.");

Benchmark: TTFB (Time to First Byte)

We tested 5,000 requests from a Vercel Edge Function located in Frankfurt. Results are averaged.

| Provider | Protocol | TTFB (p50) | TTFB (p99) | Jitter |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Morvoice Turbo** | **WebSocket** | **68ms** | **95ms** | **Low** |
| ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 | WebSocket | 240ms | 410ms | High |
| OpenAI TTS-1 | REST | 380ms | 650ms | Medium |
| Azure Neural | REST | 420ms | 580ms | Low |

Moving to Morvoice was the only way we could get our AI Sales Agent to sound natural. The interruption handling is seamless because the latency is virtually non-existent.
Engineering Lead, Vapi.ai Competitor

Conclusion

If you are building offline content, HTTP is fine. But for the next generation of AI apps, WebSockets are mandatory. Morvoice is currently the only provider offering a native, un-throttled WebSocket infrastructure at scale.