5 Mistakes Developers Make When Building Conversational AI Interfaces (And How to Avoid Them)

Conversational AI is the future. However, building a smooth, video-first interface is harder than it looks.

Whether you're building for customer support, sales reps, or a teaching bot, it's easy to run into problems that make the experience feel off. Too much latency, poor lip sync, or even the wrong interaction pattern can break trust.

In this post, we’ll cover 5 common mistakes devs make when building conversational video interfaces, and how you can avoid them.

1. Treating It Like a Regular Chatbot

Most developers start with chatbot logic and just slap a face on it. That doesn’t work.

Why it’s a mistake:
Chatbots are text-based. Users wait. Video demands flow, which requires timing, voice tone, and facial reactions.

Fix:
Design for turn-taking and human-like pacing from day one.

2. Neglecting Latency

You can have the smartest AI in the world, but if it takes 3 seconds to respond, the user bounces.

Why it’s a mistake:
TTS → LLM → STT → Avatar… it adds up. Especially when using cloud APIs without optimization.

Fix:
Use speculative inference, cache responses, and keep everything close to your user. If you're hosting on AWS or Brev, be intentional about region and container size.

3. Forgetting About the Face

Slapping a 3D face that moves its lips ≠ realism.

Why it’s a mistake:
Uncanny valley kills trust. No blinking, awkward pauses, or stiff expression = robot vibes.

Fix:
Use models that support expressive blend shapes, or feed emotion tags into your avatar rendering. Good lip sync is table stakes: micro expressions win the game.

4. Not Designing for Interruptions

In a real conversation, people interrupt. Your AI needs to handle that.

Why it’s a mistake:
Most models just wait for silence. That’s not how humans talk.

Fix:
Train or fine-tune on real dialogue. Use Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and partial STT to detect intent to interrupt.

5. Overbuilding Before Testing

It’s tempting to make everything perfect - face, voice, flow, animations - before launch.

Why it’s a mistake:
You burn time on polish before you’ve validated demand or UX.

Fix:
Start with a fake avatar. Or a basic TTS bot. Talk to 5 users before scaling.
The fastest path is: mock → test → rebuild.

Conclusion

Conversational video interfaces feel magical when they’re done right - but it’s easy to waste weeks building the wrong thing. Avoid these 5 mistakes and you’ll be far ahead of the curve.

We’re building a devtool to make all of this easier. If you want early access (or just want to see how others are doing it), sign up here.