Tune voice agent call behavior

Adjust interruptions, turn-taking, silence handling, and maximum call length for a Voice Agent on the Tuning tab.

The Tuning tab (titled Performance Setting) controls how the agent takes turns, reacts to interruptions, and handles silence and long calls. The defaults work for most agents. Change a value only when a test call shows a problem.

Select Save after you change values. The new values apply to the next call.

Pipeline and Realtime modes:

Interruption, endpointing, and punctuation settings tune the speech pipeline, so they apply in pipeline mode (STT, LLM, and TTS). Temperature, silence timeout, maximum duration, and the silence prompt apply in both modes.

Settings reference

SettingDefaultWhat it does
Temperature0.7Controls how varied the model's replies are. Lower values give more consistent replies. Higher values give more varied replies.
Min Interruption Duration (seconds)0.5How long the caller must speak before the agent treats it as an interruption and stops talking.
Interrupt Min Words0The minimum number of words the caller must say to interrupt. With 0, any speech that lasts long enough can interrupt.
Min Endpointing Delay (seconds)0.3The shortest pause the agent waits after the caller stops speaking before it replies.
Max Endpointing Delay (seconds)2.5The longest the agent waits for the caller to continue before it replies.
On Punctuation EnabledOffControls whether the speech-to-text transcript includes punctuation.
On Punctuation Delay (seconds)2A pause length at punctuation that is passed to the OpenAI text-to-speech voice. Other TTS providers ignore it.
Silence Timeout (seconds)30Ends the call when no one speaks for this long.
Max Duration (seconds)600Ends the call after this many seconds.
Max Duration MessageEmptyA message the agent says just before a call ends because it reached Max Duration.
Silence Prompt Delay (seconds)0After this many seconds of silence, the agent speaks the silence prompt. Set 0 to turn the prompt off.
Silence Prompt MessageEmptyThe message the agent speaks to re-engage a silent caller, for example "Are you still there?". Leave it empty to turn the prompt off.

Common adjustments

The agent cuts in too early or waits too long. Lower Min Endpointing Delay to reply faster. Raise it, or raise Max Endpointing Delay, if the agent replies while the caller is still thinking.

Background noise or short sounds stop the agent mid-sentence. Raise Min Interruption Duration, or set Interrupt Min Words to 2 or more so a cough or "uh-huh" does not interrupt.

Callers go quiet and the call drags on. Set Silence Prompt Delay and a Silence Prompt Message, and keep Silence Timeout longer than the prompt delay so the agent can ask first.

Calls should never run longer than a fixed time. Set Max Duration and add a Max Duration Message so the caller hears a closing line.

Agent voice, STT, and TTS are set on the Speech Settings tab. To end a call when a goal is met, add an End Call function.