# Troubleshooting

Voice problems described the way a caller experiences them, what each one usually means, and what to change.

Source: https://docs.omazy.ai/how-to/voice/troubleshooting/

import Figure from '../../../../components/Figure.astro'
import { Aside } from '@astrojs/starlight/components'

Symptoms below are written as the caller would describe them, because that is
how they get reported to you.

## The agent talks over me and will not stop

The most disorienting failure, and the least obvious. The caller says almost
nothing while the agent holds a rapid conversation with itself.

<Figure
  label="An agent hearing its own voice through the caller's speakerphone"
  caption="Nothing here is broken in the usual sense. Every stage does its job correctly on audio that should never have been treated as the caller."
>
<svg viewBox="0 0 700 165" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <text x="0" y="14" class="d-eyebrow">THE LOOP</text>

  <rect x="0" y="34" width="150" height="48" rx="8" class="d-box" />
  <text x="14" y="55" class="d-label">Agent speaks</text>
  <text x="14" y="71" class="d-sub">"How can I help?"</text>

  <path d="M154 58 L166 58" class="d-arrow" />
  <polygon points="172,58 165,54.5 165,61.5" class="d-arrow-head" />

  <rect x="182" y="34" width="150" height="48" rx="8" class="d-box" />
  <text x="196" y="55" class="d-label">Speakerphone</text>
  <text x="196" y="71" class="d-sub">plays it aloud</text>

  <path d="M336 58 L348 58" class="d-arrow" />
  <polygon points="354,58 347,54.5 347,61.5" class="d-arrow-head" />

  <rect x="364" y="34" width="150" height="48" rx="8" class="d-box" />
  <text x="378" y="55" class="d-label">Mic picks it up</text>
  <text x="378" y="71" class="d-sub">same room</text>

  <path d="M518 58 L530 58" class="d-arrow" />
  <polygon points="536,58 529,54.5 529,61.5" class="d-arrow-head" />

  <rect x="546" y="34" width="152" height="48" rx="8" class="d-box-accent d-pulse" />
  <text x="560" y="55" class="d-label">Agent replies</text>
  <text x="560" y="71" class="d-sub">to itself</text>

  <path d="M622 86 L622 108 L75 108 L75 86" class="d-arrow" />
  <polygon points="75,82 71.5,89 78.5,89" class="d-arrow-head" />
  <text x="268" y="132" class="d-accent-text">and round again, with the caller locked out</text>
</svg>
</Figure>

**What it means.** The agent is hearing itself. Almost always a speakerphone,
a car, or a laptop with speakers and no headset.

**What to do.** Raise echo suppression on the **Voice** tab. Note the
[trade-off](/how-to/voice/call-quality/#echo-suppression): while it is active the
caller cannot interrupt the agent mid-sentence. On a line that real callers
reach from cars and kitchens, that is the right trade.

## The greeting is in a different voice from the rest of the call

**What it means.** The greeting was already recorded in the previous voice and
was played before the rest of the call resolved the new one.

**What to do.** Re-record the phrases for the language you changed. If it
happens on the very first call after a voice change and never again, that is
the old recording being used once. If it happens on every call, the phrases for
that language were never re-recorded after the change.

## The greeting is not the one I wrote

**What it means.** Almost always one of two things: the phrase is still in
draft, or voice is not enabled for the app.

**What to do.** Check that the greeting is published, and that voice is
switched on. Authoring a phrase and enabling voice are separate steps on
purpose, so you can prepare a configuration without exposing it, and the cost
of that is remembering to do the second one.

## The first caller of the day waits, then it is fine

**What it means.** The phrases had not been recorded yet, so the first call
that needed one paid for making it.

**What to do.** Warm the phrases after any change to a phrase, a voice or a
language. It is the step with no visible result when you do it and an obvious
one when you skip it.

## The call connects, then apologises and hangs up

**What it means.** Something failed after the line was answered. The caller
gets a polite message rather than silence, which is deliberate, but it is
always a real fault.

**What to do.** Find the call in the log and check whether it has a transcript.
A call with no transcript at all failed before the agent ever spoke; a call
that has a greeting and nothing after it failed on the first turn. If this is
happening on every call rather than occasionally, treat it as an outage and
raise it rather than adjusting settings.

## The agent asks how it can help, over and over

**What it means.** The agent is not carrying the conversation forward, so every
turn looks like the beginning of the call.

**What to do.** This is not a phrase problem and editing the greeting will not
fix it. Check the call log: if the agent also forgets a name the caller gave a
moment earlier, or loses a booking halfway through, it is the same underlying
issue and worth raising rather than tuning.

## The agent answers in the wrong language

**What it means.** Either the language order is not what you think, or the
agent is answering in whichever language the caller used.

**What to do.** Set the language you want answers in explicitly. Keep the
recognizer listening for every language your callers actually use, including
the one you do not answer in. Callers mix languages inside a single sentence,
and a recognizer restricted to one turns the mixed words into nonsense before
the agent ever sees them.

## Callers hang up during the greeting

**What it means.** Usually the greeting is too long, and occasionally it sounds
like a recorded menu.

**What to do.** Cut it to under about ten seconds and make sure it ends with a
question. See [writing a greeting](/how-to/voice/phrases/#writing-a-greeting).

## Words get cut off at the end of sentences

**What it means.** The agent decided the caller had finished before they
actually had, or the outbound audio is stalling mid-phrase.

**What to do.** If the caller's words are truncated, they are being cut off
while speaking. If the agent's own speech stutters or drops syllables, raise
the pacing lead.

## The call went fine but never appeared in the log

**What it means.** The call reached the caller, the carrier and usually the
recording, and only the record failed to write. Nothing on the call itself
shows it.

**What to do.** Confirm against your carrier's own call history, then see
[recovering lost calls](/how-to/voice/recovering-lost-calls/). The calls and their
audio can be rebuilt; the transcript and the analysis cannot.

<Aside type="tip" title="Reproduce it before you change anything">
Voice problems are extremely condition-dependent. The same agent can be
flawless on a headset in a quiet room and unusable on a speakerphone in a car.
Before changing a setting, place a call that reproduces the complaint, on the
kind of device and connection the caller used. Otherwise you are tuning against
a line that was already working.
</Aside>