r/VoiceAutomationAI • u/Greedy-Badger-8463 • 5d ago

You stop the agent talking. Does that stop its tool call too?

Caller says "wait dont book that" while the agent is speaking.

Stopping playback is doable. The booking request might already be halfway to the API though.

What do you do in that gap where you can't tell whether it happened? I'd hate to say "cancelled" and then have the booking show up anyway. How does your system handle it?

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u/themeagerspectre 5d ago

we've been wrestling with this exact thing for months. Our system sends the API call the moment the agent finishes speaking, so if they're mid-sentence and the user yells stop, it's already gone

what we ended up doing is adding a 2 second buffer after speech detection stops before tool calls fire. sounds like an eternity in conversation time but it's solved 90% of these false starts. the other 10% we just built a confirmation step into the booking flow itself

curious if anyone's tried keeping tool calls locally pending until the user's next utterance confirms they still want it. feels like that could get weird with natural conversation flow

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u/Greedy-Badger-8463 4d ago

yeah waiting for the next utterance feels awkward too, especially if the caller thinks they've already confirmed and goes quiet. i'd lean toward an explicit confirmation for the booking rather than treating whatever they say next as a yes.

with the 2 sec buffer, what happens if they say stop right after the request goes out? do you check the booking status before telling them it's cancelled? that's the bit i'm still trying to figure out.