Hey Vapi team, can you help us understand a possible false-positive transcript/barge-in issue? Call ID: 019e3c18-c915-7002-9725-04072519956c https://dashboard.vapi.ai/calls?callId=019e3c18-c915-7002-9725-04072519956c Time: May 18, 2026 around 13:18:43 ET In the Vapi logs we see a

Deepgram final transcript

event at ~4.3s with transcript: “Yeah.” That then appears in the

conversation-update

payload as a user message: role: user message: "Yeah." secondsFromStart: 4.338 duration: 320ms wordLevelConfidence: 0.85595703 From listening to the recording / looking at the user channel, we don’t hear anything that should have produced “Yeah.” There was a

user-interrupted

event shortly before it, while the assistant was speaking the recording disclosure, so our guess is this may be an ASR or barge-in false positive, possibly caused by echo/noise from the assistant audio. Questions: 1. Is this expected behavior for short false barge-ins with Deepgram/Nova-3? 2. Is there a way to inspect the raw caller-side audio segment Vapi sent to Deepgram around 4.3s? 3. Are there recommended settings to reduce these false positives, such as interruption thresholds, denoising, endpointing, or transcript confidence filtering? 4. Should we treat short one-word transcripts during assistant speech differently on our side, or is there a Vapi-side mitigation? Relevant config from the call: - transcriber: Deepgram nova-3, language en - backgroundSpeechDenoisingPlan.smartDenoisingPlan.enabled: true - startSpeakingPlan.smartEndpointingEnabled: true - smartEndpointing provider: livekit - stopSpeakingPlan.voiceSeconds: 0.5

This really looks like a false barge-in from echo/background audio while the assistant was speaking. We’ve seen short transcripts like “Yeah” happen occasionally with Nova-3, especially around interruptions or disclosure playback. I’d probably test slightly stricter interruption/endpointing settings and ignore very short transcripts during assistant speech unless confidence is consistently high. Curious if you’re seeing this more on speakerphone or certain devices/carriers? @rod007vrr

We are experiencing the same issue with unexpected call interruptions (VAD) while using Nova-3. I also have a question regarding the "Smart Endpointing" feature. I noticed it appears in both the "Advanced Start Speaking Plan" settings and the transcription configuration. Could someone clarify the functional difference between these two configurations and how each one impacts interruption handling or speech detection behavior?

Hi, Thanks for the detailed write-up and the call ID - we were able to trace the exact sequence in the logs.