you mention voice ai in the announcement but I wonder how this works in practice. most voice AI systems are bound not by full response latency but just by time-to-first-non-reasoning-token (because once it heads to TTS, the output speed is capped at the speed of speech and even the slowest models are generating tokens faster than that once they start going).

what do ttft numbers look like for mercury 2? I can see how at least compared to other reasoning models it could improve things quite a bit but i'm wondering if it really makes reasoning viable in voice given it seems total latency is still in single digit seconds, not hundreds of milliseconds

Spot on about the TTFT bottleneck. In the voice world, the "thinking" silence is what kills the illusion.

At eboo.ai, we see this constantly—even with faster models, the orchestrator needs to be incredibly tight to keep the total loop under 500-800ms. If Mercury 2 can consistently hit low enough TTFT to keep the turn-taking natural, that would be a game changer for "smart" voice agents.

Right now, most "reasoning" in voice happens asynchronously or with very awkward filler audio. Lowering that floor is the real challenge.