Glossary
Definitions written to be quoted: a short answer up top, sources at the bottom, and nothing in between that a reader has to wade through. The schema requires at least one source per entry — no source, no page.
Voice agents
- Human handover — Transferring a live call from a voice agent to a member of staff, passing on what has already been said, according to rules the business sets in advance rather than only when the agent has run out of answers.
- Voice AI agent — Software that holds a spoken conversation on a telephone call: it understands what the caller says in ordinary language, decides what to do, performs the task, and speaks the answer back.
Call quality
- Barge-in — The ability of a caller to interrupt a voice agent while it is speaking and have the agent stop and listen, rather than finishing its sentence first. Named after the same setting in older telephony systems.
- Code-switching — Moving between two languages inside a single utterance, such as a caller who begins a sentence in Hindi, names a product in English and finishes in Hindi. Standard conversational behaviour in multilingual markets, and a common failure point for voice systems.
- End-of-turn detection — The decision a voice agent makes that the caller has stopped speaking and it is the agent’s turn to reply, usually by measuring the length of a pause. Set too short, the agent interrupts callers; set too long, every reply carries dead air.
- Response time — The silence a caller experiences between finishing what they were saying and hearing the first word of the agent’s reply. It is the single strongest driver of whether a voice agent feels like a conversation.
Phone lines and numbers
- SIP trunking — A way of carrying telephone calls over an internet connection instead of over dedicated phone lines, using the SIP protocol to set up and end each call. It is how a software voice agent gets attached to real phone numbers.
Running it in your business
- A2P call — TRAI's regulatory term for a voice call placed by an application or automated system rather than a person dialling — covering autodialled calls, robocalls, and calls using pre-recorded or artificial-voice technology, including an outbound voice AI agent.
- White label voice AI — A voice-agent platform sold to a partner who resells it as their own product, under their own brand and pricing, with each of their customers kept separate from every other one.