What is endpointing?
Endpointing is the detection of when a speaker has finished a turn - the "end point" of their utterance. It's how voice agents know when to start responding and when to keep waiting.
What is an example of endpointing?
A caller says "I'd like to book… um, a table for four, please." A naive system might endpoint after "book" and cut them off, or wait too long after "please" and feel sluggish. Good endpointing handles the hesitation and responds just after the real end of the turn.
How does endpointing work?
Endpointing combines voice activity detection, silence-duration thresholds, and increasingly prosodic or linguistic signals to decide whether a speaker is really done or just pausing.
How does ai-coustics help endpointing?
Quail VAD is our dedicated voice activity detection model and a core input to endpointing in voice agents. By identifying speech boundaries accurately even in noisy conditions, Quail VAD helps downstream endpointing logic avoid both premature cut-offs and awkward silences, making voice agent conversations feel more natural.
