Why does my voice agent sometimes pause before answering, and can I change how fast it responds?

Our agents use third party AI models, such as OpenAI, to generate what the agent says. The model typically starts responding in about 500 milliseconds, which is what you hear on most turns. Once in a while the model provider is slow to respond, so one turn takes longer. That variation comes from the provider side and is not common.

We also add a small natural delay: there must be at least half a second of pause before the system treats the caller as done speaking, so it does not cut them off.

You can adjust this in the agent's settings. Each channel has advanced settings, such as how many seconds to wait after someone stops talking before ending their turn, whether the agent can be interrupted, and whether it should ignore what the caller said during an interruption. The defaults are good and most people do not need to change them.