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Awkward Silence
# support
a
I noticed that in many calls the assistant will make a statement that results in an awkward silence because the statement did not require a response. As a result, the caller has to say "are you there?" to reactive the assistant. To prevent this, I tried using the prompt to instruct the assistant to end every response with a question, but that does not seem to always work. Is there any way to get the assistant to say something if there has been silence for more than a set amount of seconds?
v
Hi @Abe, I'm an AI assistant for Vapi. I'll analyze available sources and get back to you shortly.
----------------------------- **While I generate an answer, here are some sources that might be helpful**: * [List Assistants]() * [Create Assistant]() * [Get Assistant]() * [Delete Assistant]() -----------------------------
### Answer Yes, you can configure the assistant to react to silence within a call by setting the 
silenceTimeoutSeconds
parameter. This parameter allows you to specify the number of seconds of silence to wait before the assistant takes an action, such as speaking again to re-engage the caller. You can set this parameter when you create or update an assistant to help minimize awkward silences during calls. For example, setting it to a suitable value based on the average pause you expect in your conversations can prompt the assistant to initiate further dialogue if the silence threshold is exceeded [(1)]() , [(2)]() .
Glad I could be helpful. Feel free to create a new thread with any new questions you may have.
a
I may be wrong, but the silenceTimeoutSeconds parameter is to set how many seconds of silence to wait before ending the call. It is not how many seconds of silence to wait before saying something like, "are you there?". Am I mistaken?
s
You are correct. I am looking into this issue and will get back to you. Meanwhile can you share your call_id?
as well as the duration
a
It happened on a lot of calls, but here are some examples: 7ca263aa-0cae-4da0-9d1d-397a8c951003 (Time stamps: 4:28, 4:53, and 5:14) (duration of call: 5:55) 5c351ce3-e4f2-41ea-bddc-6723bdcd5604 (Timestamp: 00:46) (duration of call 9:24)
if there was a setting similar to silenceTimeoutSeconds, that allowed the user to select how many seconds of silence to wait before checking if the caller is still there, that would prevent these awkward silences and make the conversation feel more human.
s
Use some other LLM provider and then let me know
a
How would an LLM solve this? As far as I'm aware, another LLM provider would not solve this because the LLMs are not able to measure time and then send another message if a certain amount of time has passed without a response...
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