Great writeup. The speaking vs listening framing is underrated. TTFT with Groq and colocation are both real wins that don't get talked about enough.

For anyone wanting this production ready out of the box, Dograh is an OSS project built on the same principles and goes much beyond ( https://github.com/dograh-hq/dograh ).

Groq, Flux(Deepgram), instant barge-in cancel, full streaming pipeline etc .but also telephony, echo handling, tool calls for external services, variable extraction, and domain dictionary baked in. All the parts needed in production are already solved.