# Barge-in

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/barge-in

> Barge-in is the voice-agent feature where the user can interrupt the assistant mid-response — the assistant detects the speech and stops talking — making conversations feel natural instead of robotic turn-taking.

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Barge-in is the voice-agent feature where the user can interrupt the assistant mid-response — the assistant detects the speech and stops talking — making conversations feel natural instead of robotic turn-taking.

By 2026 barge-in is non-negotiable for production voice agents. The user starts speaking; the agent's voice activity detector (VAD) detects it within ~50-100ms; TTS halts; STT begins on the user's interrupting speech. Cartesia, ElevenLabs, OpenAI Realtime, and others all expose barge-in primitives. Implementation gotchas: distinguish actual barge-in from background noise; handle partial agent speech (mid-sentence cut should leave the agent in a coherent state); resume gracefully if the interruption was brief. Voice agents without barge-in feel painfully like IVR.

## When to use

- Realtime voice agents.
- Conversational interfaces.

## Common mistakes

- Triggering barge-in on background noise — annoys the user.
- No graceful handling of mid-sentence interruption.

## Related terms

- [voice](https://promtable.com/glossary/voice)
- [streaming-stt](https://promtable.com/glossary/streaming-stt)
- [agent](https://promtable.com/glossary/agent)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
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Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/barge-in
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