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Two behaviors control how your agent shares the conversation:
  • Interruptibility governs what happens while the agent is speaking: how readily it yields when the caller talks over it. This is a setting you choose.
  • Resumption governs what happens after the caller finishes: how quickly the agent takes its turn. This is adaptive: the agent measures each caller’s pace and matches it automatically. There is nothing to configure.

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Agent pauses

When a caller makes a sound while the agent is speaking, the agent does not cut off at the first sound. It keeps talking for a brief moment while it works out what the caller is doing, then reacts: Two things hold in every case:
  • The agent always stops at a word boundary. It never cuts off mid-word.
  • Acknowledgments never derail the agent. Short ones are spoken through; long ones get a pause, and the agent picks up where it stopped.
What counts as a “short” utterance scales with the interruptibility setting: an easy-to-interrupt agent pauses for shorter caller utterances, while a difficult-to-interrupt agent holds through more.

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Interruptibility

How readily the agent yields the floor when the caller speaks over it. Set with the interruptibility field (integer, 0-4, default 2).

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Adaptive resumption

Adaptive resumption is rolling out and may not yet be active in your environment.
How quickly the agent responds once the caller stops talking is measured per caller, per call. The agent tracks the caller’s own rhythm — how long their speech runs and how long their mid-thought pauses last — and adjusts how long it waits before taking its turn:
  • A caller who speaks quickly, without hesitating, gets near-instant responses.
  • A caller who speaks deliberately, pausing mid-sentence to think or to read out a number, gets an agent that waits out those pauses instead of jumping in, up to about two and a half seconds.
  • A caller who changes pace mid-call is matched within about fifteen seconds.
The adaptation runs continuously in both directions: slowing down earns patience, and speeding back up restores snappy responses.

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Where to set interruptibility

  • Send Call API: pass interruptibility in the /v1/calls request body. It applies to the whole call.
  • Inbound numbers: the same field on your inbound number configuration.
  • Pathways: per node, in the node inspector under Advanced options. A node’s setting applies only while that node is active; other nodes use the agent’s own setting.

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Choosing values

Response timing needs no tuning: an agent that seems to jump in on a hesitant caller will settle within a few turns as the measurement catches up to the caller’s pace.