Voice agent developers wrestle with the hardest edge case: knowing when to hang up
Kindly-Duty272 · reddit · 2026-10-21
A voice-agent developer opened a discussion on the trickiest edge case in phone agents: deciding when a call should end.
- How long to wait on caller silence before treating it as done? Heuristic rules based on turn count and VAD timing all feel arbitrary
- The failure mode he worries most about is the opposite of a bad hangup: an agent that keeps talking after a human would have ended things — a pacing problem, not a logic problem, and not fixable by better STT/TTS alone
- Open questions: fixed silent-turn cutoffs vs. explicit "are you still there?" prompts, SIP vs WebSocket differences, and whether this belongs in prompt engineering or the call orchestration layer
- He asks whether anyone has tested silence thresholds (3s vs 10s) end to end beyond the prototype stage
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