Speech technology
Barge-in
Also called: interruption handling
Barge-in is a voice agent's ability to detect when the caller starts speaking while it's talking, stop its own speech, and listen. It mirrors how humans interrupt each other and is essential to a natural conversation.
Without barge-in, callers have to wait for the agent to finish a long prompt before they can respond — the classic IVR frustration. Good barge-in requires fast voice-activity detection and clean audio handling.
Related terms
EndpointingDetecting when the caller has finished speaking so the agent knows it's its turn to respond. Bad endpointing causes awkward pauses or interruptions.Voice latencyThe delay between a caller finishing speaking and the agent responding. Low latency (sub-second) is what makes an AI voice conversation feel natural.Interactive voice responseThe classic 'press 1 for sales' phone menu system. IVR is menu-driven and can't understand free speech — the predecessor to conversational voice AI.
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