Spot on about the TTFT bottleneck. In the voice world, the "thinking" silence is what kills the illusion.

At eboo.ai, we see this constantly—even with faster models, the orchestrator needs to be incredibly tight to keep the total loop under 500-800ms. If Mercury 2 can consistently hit low enough TTFT to keep the turn-taking natural, that would be a game changer for "smart" voice agents.

Right now, most "reasoning" in voice happens asynchronously or with very awkward filler audio. Lowering that floor is the real challenge.

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