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These settings make the difference between “obviously a robot” and a conversation people stay in. All of them are per-assistant.

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Background audio

Complete silence sounds artificial on the phone. You can layer in:
  • Ambient sound — office, city, forest, crowded room, or keyboard typing, with adjustable volume (or your own uploaded audio).
  • Thinking sound — a subtle sound while the assistant is thinking — during the LLM wait and any tool calls — so processing never sounds like a dropped call.
Hold music is not part of this section: it’s configured directly on the warm transfer tool (built-in track or your own upload), since it only ever plays while a supervisor is being briefed.

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Interruption handling

Callers interrupt — good assistants deal with it gracefully.
  • Allow interruptions — on by default; the assistant stops speaking when the caller talks over it.
  • Minimum interruption duration — ignores very short noises so a cough doesn’t cut the assistant off.
  • Adaptive interruptions — backchanneling like “mhm”, “okay”, or “right” is not treated as an interruption, so the assistant keeps talking through natural listener feedback but yields to a real interjection. In compatible realtime modes, select Adaptive under Turn detection to use this behavior.
As a starting point, outbound assistants usually work better when they’re easier to interrupt — a caller who wants to jump in shouldn’t have to talk over a pitch. Reception and front-desk assistants often benefit from a bit more stability, so a stray cough or background voice doesn’t cut the assistant off mid-sentence.

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Noise & VAD environment presets

Under Conversation → Latency, Noise & echo cancellation is a single on/off toggle — the right model for the channel (phone or web) is picked for you. Below it, VAD sensitivity / noise threshold offers four environment presets that decide how loud something has to be before it counts as speech: A live latency waterfall (STT / LLM TTFT / TTS TTFB / E2E) appears only in the studio web-call test panel — never in the public widget.
Telecom guidance (ITU-T G.114) targets one-way latency under 150 ms for a call to feel natural — a useful benchmark when deciding how aggressively to tune interruption and VAD sensitivity for your use case.

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Filler phrases & async tools

When a tool call (CRM lookup, availability check) takes seconds, the assistant can bridge the gap:
  • Speak-during text — a fixed announcement at tool start (“One moment, I’m checking that…”).
  • Filler phrases — a rotating set of short phrases spoken during longer waits, with configurable initial delay and interval. Spoken only in pauses — they never talk over the caller.
  • Async tools — mark a tool node as asynchronous and the conversation continues while the tool runs; the result is woven in once it arrives.

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Idle handling

Nobody wants a call that hangs forever in silence:
  • Idle timeout — after this many seconds of silence, the assistant checks in (“Are you still there?”).
  • Idle messages — optional fixed phrases for those check-ins; leave empty for natural LLM-generated ones.
  • Max rounds — after N unanswered check-ins, the assistant says goodbye and hangs up. This also protects your minute balance.
Independently, max call duration caps every call: when reached, the assistant wraps up politely and ends the call.

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Voicemail

This setting only decides what happens once answering-machine detection (AMD) reports a mailbox on an outbound call — not what happens when a call simply rings out unanswered.
  • Leave a voicemail message — on: the assistant speaks a message, then hangs up. Off: the assistant hangs up immediately, leaving nothing.
  • Voicemail message — the free-text message spoken via TTS when a mailbox is detected. Keep it short and include a callback number. Leave it empty and the greeting / first message is used instead.
AMD runs automatically on direct outbound calls. On campaign calls, it runs when the campaign has AMD enabled or this toggle is on.
The response to a detected mailbox always comes from the assistant’s settings here, not from the campaign that placed the call — even though a campaign can separately turn answering-machine detection itself on or off.

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Ringing

Two independent timeouts control how long a call rings before something happens:
This is separate from the Call transfer tool’s own ringing timeout, which times a single transfer attempt rather than the original call.
For jurisdictions requiring all-party consent (Germany: §201 StGB):
  • Consent announcement — a configurable message played at call start (pre-generated, zero added latency).
  • Consent mode — the caller agrees verbally or by pressing a key (DTMF).
  • On decline — either continue the call, or end it politely.
  • The consent result is stored with the call, audit-proof.
One announcement can cover two separate purposes. Tick them independently in the assistant editor:
  • Recording the call — the recording starts only after consent, never before, and additionally requires Record calls. Asked on every call, because each recording needs its own permission.
  • Remember callers — a granted consent unlocks that caller’s durable memory, so returning callers are recognised without anyone approving them by hand under Audience → Customer memory. Asked once.
A declined consent is never stored as a permanent refusal: the caller is simply asked again on a later call. The memory consent is re-asked only after the retention window under Settings → Memory has lapsed without a call — the expired memory is deleted, so the next call starts fresh.
Each purpose must be named in the announcement. Consent to being recorded is not consent to storing a customer profile — they are different purposes under GDPR. When you tick a purpose, the editor offers matching wording in the assistant’s language; leaving the text empty falls back to a purpose- and language-aware default.If Record calls is on while the announcement does not cover recording, the assistant refuses to record and logs recording_skipped_no_consent — it will never record without a notice.

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Recording privacy: redaction and re-transcription

Two more controls sit next to recording, under Settings → Privacy.

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Redact PII in transcript

Selected categories of personal data are replaced with [REDACTED:type] before the transcript is stored — data minimisation, not just display masking. It applies to newly finished calls only; transcripts already stored keep their original text. Turning it on starts with four categories selected — email address, phone number, IBAN, and credit card number. The full built-in list is much larger, spanning identity, contact, government-ID, financial, security-credential, and health information, and you can select any combination of it. Beyond the built-in categories, add up to 20 of your own named patterns (regular expressions) for anything specific to your business.

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Automatic re-transcription

Independently of the manual Re-transcribe action in History, Re-transcribe recording can run for every recorded call automatically. When it’s on, each finished call’s recording is transcribed again with a higher-accuracy engine once the call ends; the enhanced transcript appears in the call’s detail view next to the live transcript. It requires Record calls to be on.
Automatic re-transcription bills per recorded minute (rounded up) at the workspace’s Re-transcribe rate; current rates are on the Usage page.

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Guardrails

Deterministic safety rails on top of the prompt:
  • Manipulation → Prompt injection — blocks attempts to bypass or override system instructions (jailbreak detection in the caller’s speech). Available on every plan, on by default; uncheck to opt out (guardrails.input.jailbreak).
  • Blocked topics — subjects the assistant must refuse; matched output is replaced by your refusal text (Fallbacks & Guardrails).
  • Escalation keywords — if the caller mentions one (e.g. “lawyer”, “emergency”), the platform — not the LLM — triggers an immediate transfer to your escalation number (Fallbacks & Guardrails).
Topic and category filters are enforced in the output path, so they hold even when a clever caller talks the model around its prompt.

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Pronunciation & text cleanup

See Models & voices → Speaking style: pronunciation dictionary, markdown/emoji filtering, speaking rate, and output volume.

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Troubleshooting

Change one setting at a time and re-test with a realistic call — small, isolated changes are much easier to judge than several at once.