A voice agent is only as good as it sounds. If customers say your agent is hard to understand, robotic, or laggy, here's how to diagnose and fix the most common issues.
Symptom 1: Long pauses before the agent responds
Some pause is expected. The agent has to transcribe what you said, think, and generate a reply. A healthy round trip is about 600 to 900 milliseconds. If it's feeling like 2+ seconds on every turn, something is off.
Common causes:
- Slow voice model. Some higher-quality voices are slower. Check the voice selection in your agent's configuration. If you're on a "Studio" tier voice, try switching to a "Realtime" tier voice and see if latency drops.
- Overloaded knowledge base. A very large knowledge base can slow response time because the agent has more to search through. Prune old or redundant documents from Dashboard → Knowledge.
- Bad network on the caller's end. If pauses only happen for some callers, it's probably their connection, not yours.
Symptom 2: Robotic, monotone voice
This is almost always the voice model itself, not a bug.
- Open Dashboard → Agents → [your agent] → Voice.
- Click through the available voices and play the samples. The ones labeled Natural or Realtime sound the most human. The older Standard voices sound more robotic but cost less per minute.
- Pick a new voice, save, and make a test call to hear the difference.
Phase 5 introduced a new selection of premium voices. If you're on the Growth or Pro tier, definitely audition those. They dramatically cut the robotic feel.
Symptom 3: Echo or double-voice on the line
Echo usually means the caller is on a speakerphone or the audio is being picked up by a microphone twice.
- Ask the customer to pick up the handset instead of using speaker.
- If it's happening on every call, it could be a carrier issue. Call support and we'll check the signaling path.
Symptom 4: Agent cuts the caller off mid-sentence
The agent has an Allow Interruptions setting that controls whether it can be interrupted while speaking. When this is on, the agent listens for caller speech and stops talking. But if it's too aggressive in your situation, it can also cut callers off.
- Open the agent configuration page (Dashboard → Agents → [your agent]) and scroll to the Voice section.
- Toggle Allow Interruptions off and test again. With interruptions off, the agent will finish each sentence before listening. Slightly less natural-feeling, but no more cutoffs.
When to call support
If you've tried the above and quality is still bad, pull up a specific call in Dashboard → Calls, click Listen, then call (833) 309-4176 and give us the call ID. We can replay it on our end and tell you exactly what was happening at each step.