Real-time applications, from live coding assistants to conversational voice agents, require LLM latency measured in hundreds of milliseconds, not seconds. Achieving this consistently demands more than a fast model weights file. It requires a systems-level approach that spans model selection, serving infrastructure, client integration, and cost controls. This guide covers the concrete techniques that reduce time-to-first-token (TTFT) and inter-token latency, and where Oxlo.ai fits into a low-latency stack.
Before optimizing, instrument your end-to-end pipeline. Real-time user experiences usually require TTFT under 200 ms and inter-token latency under 50 ms. Measure these from the client perspective, including network round trips and serialization overhead. Set budgets per model tier: a code-completion assistant has tighter constraints than a long-form reasoning agent.
Parameter count is the strongest predictor of prefill and decode latency. For real-time workloads, prefer mid-size models or efficient Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures over dense hundreds-of-billion-parameter variants.
Oxlo.ai hosts several options suited to low-latency production traffic:
If your application does not require frontier-level reasoning, a 32B or 70B model served on optimized hardware will often outperform a larger model on consumer-grade infrastructure.
Blocking until the full response is generated destroys perceived latency. Streaming returns the first token as soon as it is ready and lets you render output incrementally. Oxlo.ai supports streaming through its fully OpenAI-compatible chat/completions
endpoint.
from openai import OpenAI