[throwaway89201]

> The reason we skip 200ms instead of pausing for 200ms when we get missed packets in a WebRTC call is because we can't pause the human on the other side of the call. But we can pause AI just fine.

This isn't about pausing anyone; it's about doing faster-than-realtime processing after a delay event. Humans can do that to some extent, and this is in fact done with some voice applications like Microsoft Teams, where after a network interruption the audio is sometimes played back really fast until the point that it becomes real-time again.

I hope it's an intentional design decision, because it works really well (for me). I can often perfectly keep track of a conversation in spite of the network delay. As much as I hate Teams, its meetings and voice implementation (also noise cancellation) works quite well, especially compared to current open source solutions like Jitsi or BigBlueButton.

[modeless]

Yes, it's about pausing. You pause the AI so it doesn't need to perceive the 200ms gap at all, unlike a human who will always perceive the interruption. Yes, then you run faster than real time to catch up.

Yes, humans can listen to audio faster than real time to catch up, but it degrades the experience and there is a fairly low limit to it. When talking to an AI you don't have to skip or speed up at all on the human side, is the point.