What's the best approach to reducing the initial delay on Gemini 3.1 Live?

Google AI Studio
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I have a simple question and I haven’t been able to find a straightforward answer to this.

I’m currently improving a DYI Voice Agent integrated with Twilio through a SSL, Twilio being the host for the verified phone number and the SIP.

Besides that, we have it on a localhost with python glueing everything together.

And then obviously the integration with Gemini.

My question’s simple, how am I able to reduce the initial delay optimally? I’ve already configured several things, such as the start of speech sensitivity and the silence delay. I’ve even tried adding a manual trigger at the start to send a “nudge” towards the agent to start after 3s of silence, yet it still takes a little while.

Should I apply a .wav at the start and hopefully the agent’s “warm” by then when the person starts talking? The overall delay at the start ranges from 3/4 to 5/6 seconds, rarely more.

I’m kind of new in this field and I would appreciate some helpful feedback/tips and knowledge with this, thanks.

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There’s some limits that you can’t bypass:

  1. The time it takes for the initial prompt to reach google’s servers
  2. The time it takes for the google servers to start processing your request
  3. The time it takes for the google servers to generate the first bit of the reply
  4. The time it takes for that reply to travel back to your phone

These 4 things, you can’t do anything about them. 3 to 4 seconds delay sounds quite normal for this type of stuff.
You can probably reduce it a bit by using local AI models like gemma4 E2B combined with some good low latency local TTS model, but you need good hardware to run those together with low latency, with quite a lot of vram and compute. Is it worth it to get rid of 3 to 4 seconds of delay? I think not.
Alternatively you could use gemini 3 flash lite which is supposed to give instant answers (almost) and let that audio be read by the phone’s default TTS Engine (if your final target is a phone). This should result in a smaller delay, in theory, especially if you set thinking to low (not sure if there’s a thinking setting in gemini 3 flash lite, look into it).