Voice Agents Interrupting Callers? Blame VAD Tuning, Not Latency

Kindly-Duty272 · reddit · 2026-10-09

A detailed post-mortem on why phone voice agents interrupt callers:

Symptom: The agent answers before the caller finishes talking — reads as rude and breaks trust faster than a bad TTS voice.
Common misdiagnosis: Latency in the STT pipeline. Transcription timing is usually fine; the real culprit is VAD settings. A voice activity detector tuned for a quiet room misreads short pauses in noisy environments (traffic, TV, kids yelling) as end-of-turn, so the model jumps in early.
Fix: Loosen the silence threshold and add a small buffer before the agent starts generating a response. Once tuned, callers stop talking over the agent.
Method takeaway: Testing with background noise matters more than testing in silence. Much of what makes a call feel human lives in the silence between words, not in dashboard latency numbers.

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