# Barge-in and turn detection

URL: https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/barge-in-and-turn-detection

> How a voice agent knows a caller has stopped talking, and how it stops speaking immediately if the caller interrupts.

How a voice agent knows a caller has stopped talking, and how it stops speaking immediately if the caller interrupts.

Turn detection decides when a caller is done talking, so the agent knows it is safe to reply. Barge-in is the reverse: letting the caller interrupt the agent mid-sentence and having the agent stop immediately rather than talking over them. Getting either wrong reads as bad service on a call, an agent that jumps in too early or one that talks over an interruption.

Perceived call quality is mostly timing, and a regulated contact center cannot have its voice agent cutting off a caller reading out a case number or a balance. Getting turn taking wrong is a customer experience problem with a compliance shadow: a caller interrupted before finishing a required disclosure or confirmation.

A caller reading out a long account number needs a more patient pause allowance than a caller giving a quick yes or no answer.

**In Dynamiq**, turn detection resolves in tiers: a speech-to-text model's own native end-of-turn detection where available, then a semantic detector that judges whether the sentence sounds finished, then silence-based detection as the fallback. End-of-speech silence and turn sensitivity are both tunable, interruption is on by default, and it is always on for realtime voice agents.

## See it in Dynamiq

-   [Voice Agents](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/product/voice-agents)

## Related terms

-   [Voice agent](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/voice-agent)
-   [Speech to text](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/speech-to-text)
-   [Text to speech](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/text-to-speech)
-   [WebRTC](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/webrtc)

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