Speech Settings | Smallest AI Docs

The Speech tab (left sidebar, in the agent editor) controls everything about the audio side of a call: how the voice sounds, when the agent lets the caller interrupt it, and how it reacts to background noise or speech it couldn’t understand.

Not every field below shows up for every agent. Several depend on the voice engine and model you’ve picked on the Prompt tab, sliders like Voice Consistency, Similarity, and Enhancement only appear for engines that support them, and Voice Detection / Smart Turn Detection are hidden entirely for realtime voice models, since those handle audio end-to-end on their own.

Voice

Setting	What it does	Default
Speech Speed	How fast the agent talks.	1.2x (range 0.5x-2x)
Voice Consistency	Move it down to fix skipped words, up to fix repeated words.	Middle of the range
Voice Similarity	Higher values match the reference voice more closely; lower values give more flexibility.	Middle of the range
Voice Enhancement	Higher values give cleaner, more refined audio at the cost of a little latency.	Medium
Background Sound	Ambient audio layered under the agent’s voice, Office, Cafe, Call Center, or Static.	None
Speech Formatting	Automatically applies punctuation, paragraphs, and entity formatting (dates, times, numbers) to make transcripts more readable.	On, where supported

Speech Formatting only works for agents whose default language is English or Hindi, it’s hidden or disabled otherwise. The same restriction applies to Smart Turn Detection, below.

Pronunciation Dictionary

Fix words the default voice mispronounces, names, brands, or domain-specific terms.

Click Add Pronunciation and fill in two fields:

Field	Description
Word	The word as it normally appears
Pronunciation	How you want it said instead

There’s no phonetic-alphabet requirement, type it however reads naturally (e.g. Cerebras → sir-EE-brass). Entries show up as removable chips, and you can edit or delete them any time.

The voice itself, and the language(s) your agent speaks, are chosen on the Prompt tab, not here. The Speech tab only tunes how that chosen voice behaves.

Turn-Taking & Interruptions

Controls for when the agent lets the caller speak, and when it lets itself be interrupted.

Setting	What it does	Default
Allow Interruptions	When off, the caller’s audio is suppressed while the agent is speaking (half-duplex). Useful for agent-to-agent calls or very noisy environments.	On
Wait for User to Speak First	Skips the agent’s opening line and waits for the caller to speak first.	Off
Mute User Until First Bot Response	Mutes the caller until the agent finishes its opening line.	Off
Interruption Backoff Timer	A short grace period (in seconds) right after the agent starts talking, during which the caller can’t interrupt it. Set to 0 to disable. Helps prevent both sides talking over each other.	0s (range 0-10s)
Smart Turn Detection	Uses a model to predict when the caller has actually finished speaking, instead of just waiting for silence, cutting down on premature interruptions. Adds a little latency.	Off

Mute User Until First Bot Response and Wait for User to Speak First are mutually exclusive, turning the second one on automatically turns the first off.

Enabling Smart Turn Detection reveals a Wait Time slider (1-10s, default 3s): how long the agent waits when it’s not confident the caller has finished, before responding anyway.

Listening

How the agent filters and interprets incoming audio before it ever reaches the language model.

Voice Detection

Tunes how confidently the system decides “this sound is the caller speaking.” Shown only for non-realtime models.

Field	What it does	Default
Confidence	How strict the system is when deciding if a sound is speech. Higher is less sensitive to background noise.	0.7
Min Volume	Minimum loudness required to be treated as speech.	0.6
Trigger Time	How long to wait after speech is detected before treating it as the caller speaking.	0.2s
Release Time	How long to wait after speech ends before the agent starts responding.	0.4s

Pushing Confidence or Min Volume to the extremes (below 0.1 or above 0.9) can make the agent miss the caller entirely, or trigger on background noise.

Setting	What it does	Default
Denoising	Filters out background noise before it reaches the speech pipeline, reduces false triggers from environmental sound.	Off
Handle Unrecognised Speech	If the agent can’t hear the caller clearly, it asks them to repeat instead of going silent.	On

Customizing the 'please repeat' response

When Handle Unrecognised Speech is on, you can optionally write your own responses for when the agent can’t understand the caller (e.g. “Sorry, could you repeat that?”). Leave it empty to use Atoms’ built-in, language-aware responses, that’s the recommended default. Duplicate responses aren’t allowed, and clearing a response’s text deletes it.

Voicemail

Setting	What it does	Default
Voicemail Detection	Detects when a call has reached voicemail instead of a live person.	Off
Voicemail End Text	What the agent says before hanging up once voicemail is detected.	A default sign-off message, auto-filled when you turn detection on

Privacy

Setting	What it does	Default
Personal Info Redaction (PII)	Automatically redacts personally identifiable information from call transcripts.	Off

Enabling PII Redaction may affect transcript completeness for QA purposes.

Prompt

Pick your agent’s voice, model, and supported languages

Agent Configuration

Timeouts, transfers, variables, and everything else that shapes a call