Conversation behaviour

Everything about how the agent behaves while it is not talking: when it lets itself be interrupted, when it decides you have finished a sentence, how long it tolerates silence, what it does when a machine answers, and what the line sounds like underneath. All of it lives in the conversation block, and every 0 means "the default".

curl -s -X PATCH https://voice.sphoro.com/v1/agents/$AGENT_ID \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPHORO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "conversation": {
      "interrupt_words": 2,
      "interrupt_phrases": ["stop", "hold on", "ek minute"],
      "silence_prompt_seconds": 8,
      "silence_hangup_seconds": 20,
      "max_call_seconds": 600,
      "voicemail": "message",
      "voicemail_message": "This is Acme Clinic about your appointment. Please call us back on 020 4000 1234."
    }
  }'

Barge-in: being interrupted

Interruption is decided by words, not volume. A caller saying "mm-hm" while the agent talks is listening, not interrupting, and an agent that stops for it sounds broken.

A keypress always interrupts, whatever these are set to. It is unambiguous, and it is the reason the greeting is interruptible at all — see keypad and IVR.

Silence: when to ask, when to give up

Both clocks run from the same moment — the last thing the caller said — so silence_hangup_seconds is total, not "and then this much more".

Duration

Worth setting on anything that dials out. A conversation that will not end is a conversation you are paying for by the minute, and the goodbye means the caller is not left listening to nothing.

Voicemail

Machine detection runs alongside the call, not in front of it — waiting for a verdict before connecting audio adds seconds of silence to the opening of every call, including the ones a person answered. So the agent begins its greeting and the verdict arrives during it.

Turn taking: when the caller has finished

The single most consequential setting on a phone agent, and the one people reach for last. Too eager and it interrupts somebody drawing breath mid-sentence; too patient and every exchange gains a beat of dead air.

It is expressed as a preset, because the two numbers underneath are not independent and almost nobody wants to think about either. What you actually know is whether your callers finish their sentences briskly or ramble.

The opening

Two settings for carriers and callers that misbehave at the very start of a call. Both default to off, and both are worth knowing about before you conclude a carrier is broken.

Letting the model end the call

How the line sounds

Two of these are about the caller's ears and one is about the recognizer's.

Calling back an unanswered call

This is deliberately the only retry an agent can express on its own, because "try them again in an hour" should not require building a graph. Anything with branches, a wait window or a fallback channel — a message when the third call goes unanswered — is a journey.

Keypad-only settings

A keypad agent listens for digits rather than speech, so the silence and turn settings above do not apply to it. Its equivalents are top-level fields on the agent: no_input, max_no_input, keypad_timeout_seconds and no_match. See keypad and IVR.

What good defaults look like