Debugging short utterances ("yes", "ok") in voice agents
Blog post from LiveKit
Voice agents often fail to respond naturally to brief user replies such as “yes,” “no,” or “okay” because turn detection requires both an end-of-speech signal and a final speech-to-text transcript, either of which may be missing or delayed. Common causes include STT systems failing to finalize very short speech, overly aggressive endpointing that prematurely closes turns, permissive endpointing that creates long pauses, noise cancellation that mistakes speech for noise, and poor SIP or telephony audio quality. Recommended mitigations include enabling transcription timeouts to prompt users to repeat themselves, reviewing endpointing defaults and delays, correctly configuring or disabling noise cancellation when appropriate, improving telephony codecs and routing, and testing alternative STT providers or models. The discussion also distinguishes short answers from backchannels such as “uh-huh,” which can disrupt interruptions rather than cause silence, and recommends adaptive interruption handling. Diagnosis should rely on updated software, observability data, analysis of unusually long user turns, and systematic testing of transcription, audio-processing, turn-detection, and telephony settings.
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