What is barge-in?
Barge-in is when a user interrupts a voice agent mid-response, starting to speak while the agent is still talking. Handling it well is essential for voice agents to feel like natural conversation partners.
What is an example of barge-in?
A voice agent is reading back a list of appointment times "Monday at 9, Tuesday at 10, Wednesday at…" and the caller jumps in with "Tuesday works, book it." A good voice agent detects the barge-in, stops speaking immediately, and responds to the new input.
How to deal with barge-in?
Barge-in handling requires real-time voice activity detection on the input stream while the agent is speaking, plus echo cancellation so the agent's own TTS isn't mistaken for user speech. When VAD detects a genuine incoming voice, the system interrupts TTS playback and transitions back to listening.
How does ai-coustics support barge-in?
Quail cleans the input signal at sub-30 ms latency, Quail Voice Focus limits triggers to the main speaker, and Quail VAD detects speech onset reliably - so the agent stops talking and listens without false triggers or missed interruptions.
