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Conversation Timing

Turn Detection Eagerness​

Controls how fast the AI agent responds to customers.

Options:

  • High (most responsive): The agent will respond quickly, ensuring minimum silence after customers have finished talking. This may occasionally interrupt customers before they have finished talking if the customer pauses too long mid-sentence.
  • Medium (balanced): A balanced approach that waits a bit longer before responding. This is the default setting.
  • Low (most patient): The agent waits long, until it has very high certainty the customer is done talking. Use this if customers frequently get interrupted, or for customers that are more prone to interact with the agent with longer pauses.

Default: Medium

Initial Mute Duration​

Duration, in seconds, to keep the caller muted at the start of the conversation.

This allows your agent to finish its initial introduction message without being interrupted, which is especially useful for:

  • Longer greeting messages
  • Agents that provide important upfront information
  • Scenarios where callers call with a lot of background noise, which is more likely to interrupt the agent

Default: 0 (disabled)

Silence Timeout​

Controls how long of a pause is allowed in the conversation before the agent can receive a nudge to re-engage with the user.

Use this to prevent long pauses, where both user and agent might be waiting for each other to pick up the conversation.

When a silence occurs that lasts longer than the configured duration, the silence is classified to determine if and how the agent should re-engage. The classified category determines which next step the agent takes:

  • The caller asked for a moment (for example, "let me grab my order number"): the agent can continue to stay quiet to give the caller more time.
  • The agent got stuck (e.g., it said it would look something up but never did): the agent is nudged to do what it announced and re-engage with the caller
  • The caller simply went quiet (perhaps the caller did not hear the question): the agent politely asks its last question again.

Whenever a caller or agent says something, or when a key is pressed on the phone keypad, the silence timeout is restarted

Default: 10 seconds

Range: 10–60 seconds

When to adjust:

  • If conversations frequently experience awkward silences, or if callers often go quiet unexpectedly, lower the timeout so the agent reacts to silences sooner
  • Increase the timeout if you want the agent to be less proactive during natural silences. There is no need to increase it just because callers sometimes need time to look something up: the agent should be able to recognize that situation and wait on its own