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Turn-taking and latency
How a voice agent decides when to speak and when to stop, and how to test the pauses, the cut-offs and the wait the caller hears.
Short answer. On a phone call the caller judges the agent by the gaps. Answer too soon and it cuts people off. Answer too late and the caller thinks the line has dropped. Turn-taking covers both, so test it first.
Two failures to look for. The agent talks over the caller, or it leaves a silence the caller reads as a fault.
The words you need
- Barge-in, the caller talking while the agent is still speaking.
- Endpointing, deciding that the caller has finished.
- Voice-to-voice latency, the gap the caller actually hears.
Start with these guides
How voice agents handle interruptionsSpeech-to-speech or a chained pipeline
Barge-in, backchannels, false stops and echo, and what to measure.
How the build changes latency and interruption behaviour.
More guides in this section are on the way.