Voice agent dev on the scariest failure mode: saying 'booked' when nothing was booked
Full-Mycologist1484 · reddit · 2026-09-30
A developer running voice agents in production for months says the failures that scare him aren't dumb agents or dropped calls, but silent false positives: the agent tells a customer "you're booked for Tuesday at 2," the customer hangs up happy, and nothing was actually booked. He caught 5-6 such cases in the first month and has no idea how many he missed.
His fix is a confirmation-layer guardrail: routing voice calls and mass SMS through one pipeline (textedly) so every booking fires a confirmation text — no SMS, no booking. It's crude but works, and he's still asking the community for better failure-detection approaches.
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