Recovering an OpenAI Realtime session mid-phone-call: reconnect, rebuild or fallback?

FreJun · reddit · 2026-08-27

A practical engineering question on using OpenAI's Realtime API for phone calls: the call and the WebSocket session have different lifecycles — the socket may drop and lose conversation state while the caller stays on the line.

A recovery flow must decide: reconnect vs. new session; which context to safely restore; what the caller hears during recovery; how to clear queued audio so stale responses aren't played; and when to give up and transfer to a human. The phone-call state must remain authoritative, or the model may treat the interaction as finished while the caller is still waiting.

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