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Conversation

How the agent answers, takes turns, handles interruptions and silence, and what is kept from each call.

The Conversation section sets how a call runs once it connects. Some settings apply to every agent; the turn-taking settings apply only where jambonz runs the turns.

SettingCascaded voice pipelineRealtime voice APIConnected agentCustom harness
Answering machine detectionyesyesyesyes
Noise isolationyesnonoyes
Background soundyesyesyesyes
Recording and session datayesyesyesyes
Call goalyesyesyes, except The model decidesyes
Turn-taking, interruptions and silenceyesno: the vendor takes turnsno: the platform takes turnsyes
Tool filleryesnonono
Call settings (advanced)yesnonoyes

The greeting, and whether the agent waits for the other party to speak first, are set on the Prompt section.

Answering the call

New outbound agents start with answering machine detection on, Krisp noise isolation and a call goal. New inbound agents start with all three off. Change any of them at any time.

Answering machine detection

Answering machine detection tells a person from voicemail before the agent speaks. It is also useful when a dialer places the call and sends it to jambonz as inbound. Its fold sets:

SettingOptionsDefault
When a machine answersLeave a message after the beep (with the Message to leave), Hang up, Connect the agent anywayLeave a message after the beep
When a person answersConnect the agent, Transfer to a personConnect the agent
Give up deciding after3 to 20 seconds8 seconds

Transfer to a person uses the destination set in Transfer & hangup. It cannot dial a destination chosen by the agent, because there is no agent to choose one yet.

Noise isolation

Noise isolation cleans up the caller’s audio before it reaches speech recognition, which helps when people answer in noisy places. Choose Off, Krisp, RNNoise (open source) or ai|coustics.

Background sound

Background sound plays a quiet audio loop under the call, such as office ambience, from your own file. Give a public https:// Audio URL; nothing plays until it is set. The fold sets Loop the sound (on by default) and the Volume, from -60 dB to +6 dB relative to the file’s own level (-12 dB by default).

Recording and session data

Recording and session data keeps the audio and the full session file for this agent’s calls, for playback, downloadable transcripts and call analysis. The switch controls recording; whether session files are kept follows the account’s observability setting.

The switch needs observability set up on the jambonz account. When it is off, calls are still listed and transcribed live, but nothing is kept. Members cannot change it.

Call goal

Call goal says what counts as this agent succeeding. Every call is then marked reached or not reached, alongside who answered (person, machine, no answer). The goal is reached when any of the rules you tick happens:

  • A successful transfer to a person: the person answered and the call was bridged.
  • One of these tools ran successfully: pick the tools that mean the job was done.
  • The model decides: gives the model a mark_goal_reached tool. Describe when to call it; the description is added to the prompt.

Turn-taking

For Cascaded voice pipeline and Custom harness agents, a sentence at the top of the section sums up the current settings: how much speech interrupts the agent, when it checks in after silence, and when it gives up. Click a value in it to go to that setting.

SettingWhat it doesDefault
Speech needed to interrupt the agenthow long the caller must speak before the agent stops talking, 0.2 to 2 seconds. Shorter feels responsive; longer ignores coughs and noise0.5 s
End-of-turn detectionwho decides the caller has finished: the speech-to-text vendor, or the Krisp turn modelthe speech-to-text vendor
Check in after silenceafter this many seconds of silence the agent says something, 0 to 30. Off at 010 s

Deepgram Flux, AssemblyAI and Speechmatics detect the end of a turn themselves. With another speech vendor and no Krisp, Studio notes that replies will be slower. With Deepgram Flux, three more sliders appear: End-of-turn threshold, Eager end-of-turn threshold and Silence that ends the turn anyway. Left unset, Deepgram’s own defaults apply.

The fold below holds the rest:

SettingWhat it doesDefault
Unanswered prompts before hang-upafter this many check-ins with no answer, the agent ends the call. 0 means never2
Let callers interrupt the agentthe agent stops talking when the caller speakson
Stay quiet after an interruptionwhen off, the agent may resume if the caller only made a noiseoff
How interruptions are detectedVoice activity, or Interrupt prediction with a Prediction sensitivityVoice activity
Respondwith the Krisp turn model: how soon the agent answers, from sooner to later0.5

A Custom harness decides for itself what to do after silence: jambonz tells it when the caller has been quiet for Check in after silence, so Unanswered prompts before hang-up is not shown for it.

Restore all defaults at the bottom of the section resets the turn-taking, interruption and tool-filler settings. It leaves answering, background sound, recording, the call goal and the advanced settings as they are.

Tool filler

While tools run, in the same fold, fills the silence while a tool is working, on Cascaded voice pipeline agents:

  • Off
  • Short phrases (the default): the agent says brief phrases in the Phrase style you describe (“friendly and brief” by default)
  • Audio loop: plays the audio at a public https:// Audio URL

Start filler after sets how long a tool must run before the filler starts, 0 to 5 seconds (2 by default). An audio loop with no valid URL blocks publishing.

Each HTTP tool can also have a line the agent says before calling it. See Tools.

Call settings (advanced)

Call settings (advanced) takes any other call setting jambonz accepts, as a JSON object of up to 8 KB, for example {"boostAudioSignal": 3}. Keys jambonz does not accept are listed under the box and left out. Answering machine detection, recording and noise isolation are set by the cards above, so those keys are left out here too.