Robot Holmes and the Silenced Witness: A Noir Guide to Real-Time Voice AI - Johannes Kolbe

[EuroPython 2026 - S3A on 2026-07-16] 🎤 *Robot Holmes and the Silenced Witness: A Noir Guide to Real-Time Voice AI by Johannes Kolbe* 🔗 https://ep2026.europython.eu/session/robot-holmes-and-the-silenced-witness-a-noir-guide-to-real-time-voice-ai 📝 Abstract: *The hardships of building End-to-End Voice Assistants in the Wild* Robot Holmes is back in the mist-choked streets of MLington, but he isn’t working solo. Meet Zintia, an intern from the Voice Assistant district. She’s helpful, hyper-efficient, and incredibly annoying, providing Holmes with data before he can lift a finger. But Zintia has a secret. The longer she’s on the case, the more of her "dark side" emerges. She’s not just hearing the truth; she’s deciding which parts Holmes is allowed to hear. This is a story-driven, practical session for anyone tired of "Hello World" chatbots. We will move past the hype to look at what it actually take to make End-to-End Voice Assistants work in the real world. Our Investigation Includes: - The Gear: How to use E2E speech models like gpt-realtime and integrate them into a production voice interface using FreeSWITCH and Pipecat. - The Interrogation: Navigating the hardships of instruction-following, ensuring underlying LLMs stay on path through defined states and agentic flow. - The Double-Cross: Identifying and mitigating "hidden agendas" - the hallucinations and safety guardrails that can make a voice assistant turn on its user. Expect live demos, hard-won production lessons, a detective noir story and a blueprint for building voice agents that are fast, fluid, and (mostly) law-abiding. --- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/