Hi Vapi Support Team, I hope you're doing well. We wanted to ask if Vapi offers any support or consulting around system prompt engineering for assistants. We are currently working on improving our voice assistants and are facing a few recurring conversational issues that we believe may be related to prompt design and flow handling. Some of the main challenges we are seeing are: The assistant sometimes talks over the other person, especially during email collection or verification. It struggles when the call is answered by the wrong person, a gatekeeper, or a receptionist. In some cases, it continues trying to conduct the survey even when there is clearly no decision maker available. The assistant occasionally fails to gracefully exit or reschedule the conversation when the target contact is unavailable. We would like guidance on how to better structure our system prompts, conversation logic, or interruption handling to improve these situations. Do you have a system prompt engineer or solutions specialist who could assist us with optimizing our assistants? Looking forward to your advice. Best regards, Carl SMI

Hi @Andy These issues are typically resolved through better system prompt structure, turn-taking rules, and clear call-state handling (especially for gatekeepers and fallback flows). I can review your current assistant setup and help you refine the prompt logic so it handles interruptions, role detection, and graceful exits much more reliably. If you want, we can jump on a quick session and I’ll walk you through the exact improvements needed.

Hey, you can try making the following optimizations to your prompt - Break prompts into clear sections, such as Identity, Style, Response Guidelines, and Tasks. This ensures a consistent structure, allowing the assistant to follow a predictable flow.  - Include mechanisms for fallback and error handling in your prompts to address unexpected inputs gracefully. - Disable interruption responses that may disrupt the user experience. Adjust the response timing in the startSpeakingPlan as outlined in the Prompting Guide at [Prompting Guide](https://docs.vapi.ai/prompting-guide).  - The assistant's system prompt should reinforce its role by encouraging it to refer back to user context. This could involve programming reminders or questions to naturally reacquire context.  - Review the logic that triggers initial greeting messages. Implement conditional checks using context indicators to avoid unnecessary repeated greetings.   Additionally, please share the organization ID and assistant ID so I can look into the issue more effectively. regards Priyanshu