Barge-in

Barge-in is the caller interrupting the AI agent, and the system's ability to accept it: detecting the voice overlapping its own, stopping mid-sentence, and picking up the new thread. It's utterly ordinary human behavior — on the phone we interrupt each other constantly — and utterly impossible for a classic IVR, which reads out its message no matter what.

Technically, barge-in requires continuous streaming speech recognition and very low latency: a system that takes two seconds to realize it's being interrupted turns every conversation into a patience contest. In use, it's the fastest marker separating a natural AI voice from a robot: if you can cut it off like a real person, the conversation flows.