What is VAD?
Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is the process of determining whether a segment of audio contains speech or not. It's a foundational building block in voice AI.
What is an example of VAD?
In a voice agent, VAD signals the end of a user's turn so the system can hand off to the language model and generate a reply.
How does VAD work?
Classical approaches use energy thresholds and spectral features, flagging segments whose volume and frequency profile match speech. Modern AI-based VAD uses compact neural networks trained on large datasets of speech, silence, and noise, making them robust in difficult conditions like background chatter, music, or reverb where simple thresholds fail.
How does ai-coustics use VAD?
At ai-coustics, we offer Quail VAD - our dedicated, low-latency voice activity detection model built for real-time voice AI pipelines. It integrates with the Quail enhancement family to identify speech boundaries accurately even in noisy environments, supporting reliable turn-taking, smarter endpointing, and more efficient downstream processing by only triggering ASR and other models when speech is actually present.
