Turn-Taking, Interruptions and Dead Air

Three settings decide the rhythm of a call: how sensitive the agent is to speech, how long a pause has to be before it takes its turn, and how much speech a caller needs to produce to cut the agent off. Three more decide what happens when nobody says anything at all.

All six live on the Voice tab under Audio & Turn-Taking, with Quick presets above the manual fields. Most agents should use a preset.

What you'll need

Start with a preset

Voice → Audio & Turn-Taking → Quick presets ("Pick a preset or fine-tune manually"). Clicking one writes all six values at once; the active preset is highlighted with a tick while the values still match it.

Preset For Activation Threshold Min Silence Min Speech No Response Prompt After Disconnect After
Conversational — Balanced for everyday calls Most agents. The speech detector's own defaults. 0.5 0.55 s 0.05 s 60 s 150 s 180 s
Fast-paced — Snappy turn-taking Short transactional calls, confirmations, quick lookups 0.3 0.35 s 0.03 s 30 s 90 s 120 s
Patient (IVR) — Tolerates long pauses Callers reading a number off a document, navigating a menu, or thinking 0.6 0.75 s 0.1 s 90 s 240 s 300 s

A new agent starts on Conversational.

What the three turn-taking fields do

All three are in seconds. The form's help text under each field says the same thing.

Activation Threshold — voice detection sensitivity, between 0 and 1. How confident the agent must be that it is hearing a human voice rather than background noise. Lower is more sensitive: it picks up quiet speech, and also picks up traffic, a television and a colleague two desks away. Raise it for callers on speakerphone in loud places; lower it for soft-spoken callers on a clean line.

Min Silence Duration — the pause that ends the caller's turn. The agent waits this long after speech stops before treating the turn as finished and starting to answer. This is the single biggest lever on how the call feels. Too short and the agent talks over someone who was mid-thought; too long and it seems slow.

Min Speech Duration — speech needed before the caller can interrupt. How much continuous speech the caller must produce for the agent to stop talking and listen. Low values let a "yes", "no" or "wait" cut the agent off; higher values mean a cough, a "mm-hm" or a door closing will not.

flowchart LR
    A["Caller speaks"] --> B{"Loud enough?<br/>(Activation Threshold)"}
    B -- no --> A
    B -- yes --> C{"Long enough to<br/>interrupt?<br/>(Min Speech Duration)"}
    C -- yes --> D["Agent stops talking<br/>and listens"]
    C -- no --> A
    D --> E{"Silence held for<br/>Min Silence Duration?"}
    E -- no --> D
    E -- yes --> F["Caller's turn ends —<br/>agent answers"]

Silence must be longer than speech

Min Silence Duration should always be greater than Min Speech Duration. They measure different things — one is a pause, the other is continuous speech — and if speech is the longer of the two, short replies stop working as interruptions: the caller says "no" and the agent keeps going.

The form warns you inline when they are the wrong way round:

Min Speech Duration is longer than Min Silence Duration: short replies such as "yes" or "no" will not interrupt the agent. The presets set silence longer than speech.

Every preset satisfies this. If you are typing values by hand and are not sure, click Conversational and adjust from there.

Values are checked, and the page tells you the truth

Each field accepts 0 to 10 seconds, and Activation Threshold accepts above 0 up to 1. A value outside those bounds is not silently honoured — calls fall back to the default, and the form says so:

Min Silence Duration 500 is not a usable value in seconds (0–10); calls use the default 0.55s.

The View Voice Agent (Production) page prints the effective value — what a call will actually use — rather than the stored number, so a substitution is visible rather than something you discover on a call: 0.55s (stored 500 is out of range; default applied).

If turn-taking values on an agent were ever corrected for you, the same card notes when, why, and what the previous values were.

If you had an editor tab open when values were corrected, saving from it will not undo the correction: the save lands, and you are told "Turn-taking values were left at their corrected settings; this tab was opened before they were corrected." Reload the page and the fields are editable as normal.

"The agent responds too slowly"

This is the most common tuning request, and the lever is almost always Min Silence Duration. Work through it in this order:

  1. Lower Min Silence Duration. This is the only one of the three that affects the gap before the agent answers. Going from 0.55 s to 0.35 s (the Fast-paced value) is a change callers notice. Below about 0.55 s the agent starts cutting off people who pause mid-sentence, so treat that as a practical floor for conversational calls and only go lower for short, transactional ones.
  2. Accept that some of the gap is fixed. Endpointing adds roughly another 0.6 s beyond your setting before the agent commits to answering. You cannot tune that away.
  3. Then look at the model, not the audio. The remaining second or so is the model composing its reply. Lower Thinking Level on the Setup tab, and shorten the instructions — a long prompt costs time on every single turn. Cutting 1,000 words of instructions can help more than any audio setting.

Do not raise or lower Min Speech Duration to fix latency. It governs interruptions only, and changing it will not make the agent answer sooner.

"The agent talks over me" / "I can't interrupt it"

Dead air: what happens on a silent line

Voice → Audio & Turn-Taking → Dead-Air Timeout ("Automatically prompt and disconnect when prolonged silence is detected") has three whole-second fields:

Field Default What it does
No Response (sec) 60 Disconnect if the caller never speaks at all after the greeting
Prompt After (sec) 150 Say "Are you still there?" after this much silence
Disconnect After (sec) 180 Disconnect after this much silence, once the caller had spoken

They exist because a caller who puts the phone down without hanging up otherwise holds the line — and the minutes — open indefinitely.

Set them longer for calls where silence is legitimate (someone fetching a document, a caller on hold at their end) and shorter for high-volume lines where an abandoned call is just cost.

A running agent timer suspends these rules. If the agent has started a countdown for the caller — "take two minutes, I'll wait" — the silence timers do not fire while it runs. See Tools, Knowledge and Memory.

Check your change on real calls

Turn-taking is not something to judge from one test call. After a change, let the agent take a handful of real calls, then open Agents → Agent Types → Voice Agents, click ⋯ on the agent's row and choose Performance & insights. Four tiles there measure exactly what you just changed:

Tile What it tells you
Interruptions / call How often callers successfully cut the agent off. A flat zero on calls where people plainly tried is the Min Speech Duration problem above.
Response latency How long the agent waited before answering — what a caller experiences as "slow".
LLM / TTS first byte How much of that wait is the model composing, not your audio settings. Compare the two before touching Min Silence Duration again.
Tool success Unrelated to timing, but worth a glance: a failing tool stalls a call more than any setting here.

The tiles only appear once calls have been taken on the current settings.

Then use Simulate Call on the Test & Deploy tab to hear it yourself over a real phone path; the browser test panel is not a fair test of telephony timing.

Troubleshooting

Next steps