AI voice bot troubleshooting: interrupts, stays silent, repeats itself

AI voice bot troubleshooting usually starts with two complaints after a calling campaign goes live: the bot interrupts clients or stays silent. The client cannot finish a sentence or listens to dead air and hangs up, while the minutes are already paid for. Almost always the cause is not a failure but one or two settings that you can tune in a few test calls.

Speech recognition settings are the rules the bot uses to decide that the client has finished and it is time to answer: how long to wait in silence, which sound counts as silence and how many client words interrupt the robot. Below you will find a complaint-to-setting table, the order of checks and how to send a sample call to support if it really is a failure.

Why does a voice bot interrupt callers or stay silent

While the client is talking, the bot listens and waits for a pause. When silence lasts longer than the set time, the bot decides the client has finished and answers. If the pause is too short, the bot interrupts mid-word; if it is too long, the client hears silence. These settings live on the bot card: “Settings” → “General” → “Speech recognition settings”.

• “Customer's first answer” — from 1 to 3,000 ms, 1,250 by default: how much silence to wait after the client's first “Hello”.
• “Later answers” — from 500 to 3,000 ms, 700 by default: the pause before each following reply of the bot.
• “Minimum customer words before the AI can be interrupted” — 1, 2, 3 or 100, 1 by default. At 1, any word, a short “uh-huh” or noise interrupts the bot, and any number above 3 is replaced with 100 automatically.
• “Silence sensitivity” — from 1 to 4, 3 by default: any sound quieter than this level counts as silence.
• “Wait time in milliseconds, 4000-8000” — how long the bot waits for an answer before saying “I can't hear you”.

Complaint → what to change

How to tune voice bot settings step by step

1. 1
   Find the problem call

   Open “Training AI” and click “Find a call”: in the “Call ID for the last 7 days” window, pick the conversation or paste its ID. The call loads into the test chat, so you can see what the bot heard and how it replied.
2. 2
   Find the row in the table

   Match the complaint with the table above and pick one setting.
3. 3
   Change one thing at a time

   Move a slider or change a number by one step and leave everything else alone. This way you know exactly what helped.
4. 4
   Save

   Click “Save” in the bottom panel: without it, the new pauses do not reach real calls.
5. 5
   Call the bot

   Use the “Test call” phone icon on the “Instruction” tab. Speak the way your clients do: with pauses, “uh-huh” and background noise.
6. 6
   Check live calls

   After the first conversations with clients, listen to a few recordings in “Call details”.

How the same settings make the bot's speech faster and more natural is covered in “How to make an AI voice bot sound human”.

Clicks, distortions and a bot that introduces itself wrongly

The sound of the voice is controlled by the “Additional settings” under the “Hear how the robot sounds” block — not every voice has them. “Stability” takes only 0, 50 or 100: the lower it is, the more emotion and the more one take of a phrase differs from another. “Similarity” goes from 0 to 100, 75 by default: how closely the timbre is reproduced. Type the problem phrase into “Hear how the robot sounds” and click “Voice it” — voicing is paid, $0.00008 per character. If the phrase sounds clean in the recording but clicks in a call, send a sample to support.

If the bot names another company or someone else's name, check “Sales role” and “Starting phrases”: if the generation wizard was closed too early, the fields may still contain an example of another online school. The bot can also take another client's name or date from the reply cache. Mark phrases with client data with the “Do not cache this block” parameter — how to do it is covered in “AI voice bot script”. Note: with this parameter in the instruction, “AI caching” cannot be turned on.

The bot used to work, and now it doesn't

Open “Settings” → “Backups & logs” → “Save logs”: you can see who saved the bot, when, and what they changed. The log keeps entries for 30 days, but no more than 200. A backup is taken on every save, and the 6 latest are kept. Found a bad edit? Click the date of the right backup → “Load into the editor” → “Save”.

How to send a sample call to support

A sample call saves a long back-and-forth: support hears exactly what the client heard. Collect:

• the call clid — “Telephony” → “Call details”, the “Copy clid” button in the “Record” column of the call;
• the recording — “Play” and “Download” in the same place; note the second where the bot interrupted, went silent or distorted the sound;
• the bot number — in the “Voice AI bots” list, click “#number” in the bot row, and it is copied to the clipboard;
• what exactly is wrong and which settings you have already changed.

Send everything via the “Help” → “Support” menu. You can also analyze a call from the last 7 days yourself: “Training AI” → “Find a call” loads it into the test chat — more in “How to train an AI voice bot”.

When it is a failure, not a setting

• After changing a setting and clicking “Save”, a test call behaves exactly as before.
• A phrase sounds clean in “Voice it”, but in a call it has clicks and gaps.
• The bot stopped answering in all calls at once, and the “Save logs” show no edits for those days.

In these cases, do not change settings at random — send a sample call. And if the bot hangs up in the first seconds of a conversation, it may be the answering machine protection: how it works and when to turn it off is covered in “Answering machine detection”.

Read also: How to make an AI voice bot sound human, How to train an AI voice bot, Answering machine detection