Have you been able to get your assistant react to silence ? What I mean is : imagine the assistant is waiting for an answer, but the caller doesn't answer for 10 seconds. The assistant would then react like "hello ? you still there ?" 🤔

you can use idle messages. cc: @Kings_big💫

Yes, in Vapi you can handle silence by setting a "Silence Timeout" in the assistant settings, after a set duration 10secs, the assistant can respond with a prompt like "Hello? Are you still there?".

@Kings_big💫 thanks for your help. The silenceTimeoutSeconds is rather about ending the call right ? Where in the API can I do what you are mentioning ?

You’re right silenceTimeoutSeconds ends the call after silence, but to prompt users mid-call “Are you still there?”, use a server webhook to detect inactivity and send a server-message response before the timeout triggers.

@Kings_big💫 thanks for your quick reply. Can't find which server messages I should "listen" to in order to detect X seconds of silence - can you help me there ?

Set silenceTimeoutSeconds in your assistant settings and listen for the silence webhook event sent to your server.

@Kings_big💫 but it says in the "silenceTimeoutSeconds" attribute definition that this will end the call 😬 I could detect it and inject new message via live control, but how is it going to work if it ended the call ?

SilenceTimeoutSeconds ends a call after user silence, but you can monitor for silence via webhooks and inject a prompt using Live Call Control to re-engage the user before the call ends.