Perceived Latency: The Invisible KPI Killing Voice Experiences
Your teams track conversion, NPS, session time. Nobody tracks the assistant's silence. Yet that's what drives users away.
There's a precise moment when a voice experience tips from "fluid" to "broken." It's not the wrong answer. It's not the crash. It's the silence: the user asks a question out loud, and nothing happens.
The threshold is known: roughly 800 milliseconds of unmanaged silence, and the illusion collapses. In a real conversation, a pause that long is filled by a glance, a breath, a "hmm", signals that say "I heard you, I'm thinking." Remove them, and the same pause turns anxious. The user wonders: did it hear me? Is it thinking? Did it crash?
A collapsed illusion of conversation doesn't rebuild. The user won't leave a negative review. They'll just stop using it.
