What is jitter?
Jitter is the variation in arrival time of audio packets over a network. In a perfect stream, packets arrive at a steady cadence; in a jittery stream, they arrive early, late, or out of order, disrupting real-time playback and processing.
What is an example of jitter?
A voice agent call routed over a congested mobile network experiences jitter when some packets arrive 20 ms late and others back-to-back. Without compensation, the audio fed to ASR becomes choppy or temporally distorted.
How does jitter buffer work?
Jitter is introduced by queuing, routing, and congestion anywhere between sender and receiver. To compensate, real-time systems use a jitter buffer that holds incoming packets briefly and releases them at a steady rate, trading a small amount of added latency for smooth playback.
How does ai-coustics handle jitter?
Quail is designed for real-time voice pipelines where jitter can naturally happen. Because it processes audio frame by frame at down to 30 ms latency, it integrates cleanly with standard jitter buffers in transports like RTP, WebRTC, and SIP without adding meaningful delay of its own.
