Key takeaways:
- Low latency is critical to ensuring a smooth experience for applications that involve real-time communication between two systems or servers.
- Physical and software factors both play a key role in determining latency.
- It’s important to optimize your latency and monitor it to ensure it remains under an acceptable threshold.
Latency is the silent factor that can make or break your customer experience. Whether it's powering real-time gaming, ensuring smooth virtual meetings, or enabling seamless AI-driven customer interactions, low latency plays a crucial role. For instance, 70% of service businesses now use customer-facing intelligent assistants (AI agents) to automate customer service, but without minimal latency, these tools can feel sluggish and unresponsive.
The ideal latency varies by use case—gaming demands under 50 milliseconds for a fluid experience, while virtual meetings aim for anything below 100 milliseconds. If your app involves real-time communication or interactivity, managing latency is non-negotiable. In this guide, we’ll break down what latency is, why it matters, and actionable strategies to optimize it for your use case.
What is Low Latency?
Low latency refers to a minimal delay between the user’s action and the system’s response.
Reduced latency, or better yet, ultra-low latency, minimizes these delays and helps deliver a smooth, lag-free user experience. Achieving low latency is critical in applications where real-time feedback matters, such as conversational video interfaces (CVI), video streaming, and online gaming.
For example, the usual latency in video communications ranges from a noticeable 200 to 400 milliseconds (ms), or sometimes even seconds. However, a CVI that can reduce latency to under 100 ms offers users a far better experience that feels instantaneous, frictionless, and more human.
Why is Low Latency Important?
Low latency is important because it makes digital experiences feel natural and human. In a world driven by real-time communication and fast internet speeds, customers expect platforms to be built with optimum latency, allowing them to stay engaged without delays.
The importance of low latency isn’t limited to gaming and virtual meetings. It’s also important for use cases in other industries such as telemedicine (healthcare), high-frequency trading (finance), and autonomous healthcare (automotive).
How to Measure Latency
There are various ways to measure latency. The best method depends on your specific use case. Let’s talk about the most commonly used latency measurement tools.
- Ping: A ping test involves sending a small data pocket from your device to another and recording how long it takes the packet to travel back (known as round-trip time, or RTT) to the original device.
- Traceroute: Traceroute offers a more detailed view of latency. It measures latency across each “hop” in the network path between the source device and destination. This helps measure the duration of each segment of the journey, allowing you to identify bottlenecks.
- Application-level monitoring: In real-time applications like CVIs, latency is measured within the application, often via a built-in analytics feature. It’s a more direct method that focuses on real-world user experience.
- Network monitoring solutions: Specialized network monitoring tools are used to monitor network performance, which can help you discover latency-related issues. They help track and analyze data packets, diagnose issues more precisely, and show latency in detail.
- Real-user monitoring (RUM): RUM involves collecting data from user devices in real-time to track the exact time it takes for content to load, interactions to respond, or videos to stream. It captures various real-world conditions, including network speeds, device types, and geographic location.
Low Latency Use Cases
Low latency is an important factor in delivering an exceptional experience for applications where minor delays can disrupt user experience. Let’s dive into the top use cases where low latency is mission-critical.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
Low latency ensures that data requests and responses are instant when applications communicate via APIs, especially in complex workflows or microservice architectures. For example, low-latency CVIs are vital to making interactions feel instant and natural.
That’s where Tavus CVI comes in. Tavus CVI achieves ultra-low latency by optimizing data flow through multiple layers, including speech recognition and LLMs, in a streamlined pipeline. Users can choose specific pipeline modes, each of which is tailored to minimize lag at every interaction step.
Audio and Video Streaming
Latency impacts how “live” the stream really is. If latency is high, users might hear or see content after a delay of a few seconds, which leads to a poor experience. Low-latency streaming platforms like HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) and DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) with low-latency optimizations or WebRTC help reduce delays and deliver a more engaging experience.
Real-Time Communication
Video calls, instant messaging, and collaborative tools depend heavily on low latency to feel natural. Think about video calls for example. A video call feels natural because platforms like Skype and WhatsApp keep latency to a minimum to prevent awkward pauses between speakers. Similarly, collaborative tools like virtual whiteboards can sync every collaborator’s contributions in real-time thanks to low latency.
Online Gaming & Esports
Imagine playing games like World of Warcraft with frequent lags—a small delay can be the difference between winning and losing when gaming. Low latency ensures that all commands, such as moving a character or aiming a gun, translate instantly into game actions and create a smooth, responsive experience. That’s why network protocols and gaming infrastructure are optimized to achieve low latency, typically aiming for under 20 ms.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
AR and VR experiences feel immersive and realistic only when latency is low. High latency disrupts the sense of presence, causing delays between a user’s movements and the display’s response. This results in a poor experience and sometimes gives the user motion sickness. For example, AR applications in industrial settings require low latency to overlay digital information in real-time and provide accurate, context-sensitive data without noticeable lag.
Factors Affecting Latency
Multiple factors drive latency, which means they also impact user experience. All factors can be categorized into physical and software factors. Let’s dig a little deeper into each.
Physical Factors
The physical infrastructure and environment that support data transmission impact latency. Here are some factors to look at when trying to optimize latency:
- Physical distance: Distance and latency are directly proportional because it takes data longer to travel a longer distance. For example, satellite internet typically has higher latency because of the distance between Earth and the satellite.
- Transmission medium: The medium through which data travels—fiber optics, copper cables, or wireless—impacts latency. Fiber-optic cables offer faster signal transmission (and lower latency) than copper or wireless networks because the latter often experience interference and signal degradation.
- Routing and hops: The number of hops data makes is directly proportional to latency. Ever wondered why VPNs (virtual private networks) slow down your internet speed and result in the occasional buffering when you’re streaming on Netflix? It’s because the data has to travel via an intermediary server that’s often located in another country before reaching your device.
Software Factors
Latency also differs among software solutions because they use different protocols, configurations, and network management strategies to control data transmission. Here are the software factors that drive latency:
- Network congestion: Congestion occurs when too many users or devices use the same network resources. Effective network load balancing and traffic management are critical, especially during peak traffic periods, to keep latency under acceptable levels.
- Processing delays: Programs that process data—security checks, encryption, and error correction—cause delays if they have to process data that’s too complex or if hardware is overloaded.
- Data packet size: Larger data packets take longer to travel. However, there are ways to optimize, such as packet fragmentation or compressions, and minimize the impact of data packet size on latency.
- Protocol overhead: Different transmission protocols add varying levels of overhead. For example, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) has a higher overhead and latency because of its error-checking and retransmission processes. On the other hand, UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is designed to minimize latency, though at the cost of reliability.
- Client-side rendering: Delayed rendering of processed data introduces lag even though there’s no real latency. This means your choice of software and the device you’re using it on impact your perceived latency.
- Quality of Service (QoS) settings: QoS policies help reduce latency for critical applications by assigning them a higher priority. For example, you can prioritize time-sensitive data like video streaming or online gaming packets in your QoS settings to reduce latency.
How to Plan for Low Latency
There are various levers you can pull on to optimize latency. Start by looking at the full spectrum of your network and application stack as well as the physical components of your infrastructure to get a sense of the levers available in your specific case.
Consider choosing an API designed to support high performance and achieve low latency. Take Tavus CVI for example. It offers the most realistic white-labeled video interactions in the market, making it perfect for developers looking to help their app users create fast, personalized experiences in areas like marketing, customer support, and more.
The best part? Tavus CVI offers the lowest latency (~600 ms) between utterances on the market.
Here are some other strategies to reduce latency:
- Use shorter data routes: Using content delivery networks (CDNs), which are geographically dispersed servers, is an excellent way to lower latency by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user.
- Use low-latency protocols: Consider choosing protocols like UDP or WebRTC. They prioritize speed over reliability, which cuts down processing time for real-time communication and lowers latency.
- Prioritize traffic with QoS: Prioritize time-sensitive traffic like video calls or gaming data to ensure these packets are processed first.
- Optimize packet size: Keep packet size to a minimum and use other strategies to handle packets, such as TCP segmentation offload (TSO) and packet compression to keep packets moving quickly through the network.
- Minimize processing delays: Optimize code and reduce unnecessary computations or checks to streamline server-side processing and improve latency.
- Upgrade network infrastructure: Invest in fiber optics and ensure other hardware components are up to date to handle high-speed data.
- Monitor network performance: Use network monitoring tools to track latency, identify bottlenecks, and address them as quickly as possible to prevent issues before they affect users.
Learn More About Low Latency
Now that you know what low latency is and why it’s important, let’s address some frequently asked questions about low latency.
Is lower latency better?
Lower latency is better than higher latency in most cases, especially where speed and real-time interaction are important. Low latency is a key driver of customer experience because it prevents lags when interacting over a video call, playing an online game, or using a device for any real-time communication with another system or device.
What does turning on low latency do?
Turning on low latency reduces the delay between when a user performs an action (like speaking to a digital replica) and when the system responds. Low latency prevents jitter and buffering when streaming live video, prevents disorientation and motion sickness when using AR or VR devices, and allows systems that need to process and respond to high volumes of requests quickly to operate more effectively, among other things.
How can I measure the latency of my mobile app?
Network monitoring tools, built-in developer tools like Android Profiler in Android Studio or Instruments in Xcode, RUM solutions, and third-party latency testing services are some common ways to measure the latency of your mobile app.
What are some strategies to reduce latency in mobile apps?
Here are some strategies to reduce latency in mobile apps:
- Choose APIs designed to minimize latency and implement load balancing on your server to distribute traffic.
- Cache data locally on the device using tools like SQLite for Android or Core Data for iOS and preload important data ahead of time.
- Use edge servers to reduce the need for data to travel long distances and CDNs to cache static content at edge locations.
- Use lightweight and efficient data formats like Protocol Buffers or JSON instead of XML for communication between the app and server.
Explore Video APIs Optimized for Low Latency
Low latency is one of the most powerful levers of CX. Excessive lags frustrate users, encouraging them to consider other options. But it doesn’t have to come to that if you implement the strategies discussed in this guide.
If you’re looking to embed video capabilities, such as dynamic video generation and hyper-realistic video avatars, Tavus API is your best bet to ensure minimum latency. Tavus API helps developers allow users to create highly personalized videos at scale and offers an extensive feature set, including seamless lip-syncing, voice cloning, and avatar API. These capabilities help you deliver exceptional experiences and a highly immersive medium to interact with your business.
