# Interrupt handling

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/interrupt-handling

> Interrupt handling is the voice-agent capability of detecting when a user starts speaking over the AI's reply and immediately stopping playback — the difference between feeling natural and feeling robotic in production phone agents.

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Interrupt handling is the voice-agent capability of detecting when a user starts speaking over the AI's reply and immediately stopping playback — the difference between feeling natural and feeling robotic in production phone agents.

When humans talk on the phone, we interrupt each other constantly — to confirm, clarify, redirect. Voice agents that ignore interrupts (talk over the user, refuse to stop) feel robotic and break the conversation. Production interrupt handling combines: [[vad]] (voice activity detection) running continuously on the user audio, [[barge-in]] logic to cancel current TTS playback within ~100ms of detected speech, [[streaming-stt]] to process the interrupting words as they arrive, and an LLM call that incorporates the interrupt into the next turn rather than ignoring it. Retell AI leads in 2026 on interrupt-handling quality; Vapi, Pipecat, LiveKit Agents support it but with varying tuning.

## When to use

- Any production voice agent — non-negotiable.
- Phone agents especially — phone callers expect natural turn-taking.

## Common mistakes

- Tuning VAD too sensitive — every background noise stops playback; agent stutters constantly.
- Tuning VAD too lax — agent talks over the user; conversation collapses.

## Related terms

- [barge-in](https://promtable.com/glossary/barge-in)
- [vad](https://promtable.com/glossary/vad)
- [voice-agent-platform](https://promtable.com/glossary/voice-agent-platform)

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