Griffin replies in 0.43 s; a Sume video job takes minutes

Tavus's Griffin page reports an average response time of 0.43 seconds (0.27 best, 0.59 worst) for a full-duplex video-to-video model that listens and speaks at the same time. A Sume video job is a different kind of call: you submit, it is queued or processing, and you poll or take a webhook until it completes, which Sume's docs say takes from about 30 seconds to several minutes.

So Sume clips belong around a live conversation, not inside it. Read on 2026-10-07: Tavus's Griffin page and Sume's video docs.

The two shapes

Where a rendered clip fits

• Before the call: a 5 to 10 second branded intro, rendered ahead of time.
• After the call: a recap clip or a follow-up message.
• Between sessions: scene-setting footage for a lobby or waiting state.
• As a fallback: if the live model is unavailable, show a pre-rendered clip.

Planning for the wait

Sume accepts a valid job as queued when your workspace is at its concurrency limit and moves it to processing later, per the generation admission docs. If your product shows a clip right after a button press, render the clip earlier, not at the moment of the click. A webhook (callback_url on /v1/videos) avoids holding a poll loop open.

Be careful with the claims

Tavus states that Griffin-Lite is not available to customers at this time, so there is nothing to integrate today. The page's benchmark claims are Tavus's own and are not repeated here.

Handling the wait on the Sume side

Send an Idempotency-Key with each submit so a retry does not create a second job, and use a callback_url webhook rather than a tight poll loop if your service can receive one. On /v1/videos, the poll status is pending or in_progress until it reads completed.

What the Tavus numbers do and do not say

The figures are an average, a best case and a worst case from the vendor's own page, so plan for the worst case of 0.59 seconds, not the average. They describe reply latency in a live exchange, not the time to produce a finished, downloadable clip. Sume does not list Griffin in its video catalog, so there is nothing to compare row against row. The point of the contrast is the shape of the call, not a ranking.