One voice call, three meters, one comparable number
A cascade agent bills each hop in a different unit; normalizing to dollars per conversation-minute makes the stacks comparable.
Caller audio
One conversation-minute
Cascade stack
Speech-to-text
Bills audio-minutes
LLM
Bills tokens
Text-to-speech
Bills characters
$0.0037 to $0.025
Per conversation-minute, measured
Realtime stack
Realtime speech model
Bills audio tokens only: 1 per 100 ms heard, 1 per 50 ms spoken
$0.016 to $0.057
Per conversation-minute, measured
Measured in the voice-agent study; the realtime premium buys 1.7 to 2.1 s voice-to-voice latency against 4.9 to 7.7 s for the cascade builds.