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Two settings 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.
  • Resumption speed governs what happens after the caller finishes: how quickly the agent takes its turn.
They are independent, and both are optional. An agent with neither set uses the balanced defaults described below.

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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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Resumption speed

How quickly the agent responds once the caller stops talking. Set with the resumption_speed field (integer, 1-3, default 2).
resumption_speed supersedes the older interruption_threshold field. When both are set, resumption_speed wins. Prefer resumption_speed for new configurations; interruption_threshold remains accepted for backward compatibility.

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Where to set them

  • Send Call API: pass interruptibility and resumption_speed in the /v1/calls request body. They apply to the whole call.
  • Inbound numbers: the same fields on your inbound number configuration.
  • Pathways: per node, in the node inspector under Advanced options.
A node’s setting stays in force for the rest of the call, not just that node, unless a later node changes it. If the agent misbehaves at a node with no setting of its own, check the nodes before it.

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Choosing values

The two combine. A common “let the caller drive” setup is Easy interruptibility with Slow resumption; a common “get through the script” setup is Difficult interruptibility with Fast resumption.