Noise cancellation improves turn-taking for AI Voice Agents

Summary

Turn-Taking is a big challenge AI Voice Agents are rapidly evolving, powering critical use-cases such as customer support automation, virtual assistants, gaming, and remote collaboration platforms. For these voice-driven interactions to feel natural and practical, the underlying audio pipeline must be resilient to noise, responsive, and accurate—especially in real-time scenarios. In a typical deployment, audio streams originate from diverse endpoints like mobile applications, web browsers, or traditional telephony and are delivered via real-time communication protocols like WebRTC or WebSockets (WSS). This audio is aggregated and managed through specialized providers like LiveKit, Daily, or Agora, which ensure reliable, low-latency audio transport to the server-side pipeline. Within the server pipeline, once the audio arrives, it undergoes optional preprocessing steps for formatting or basic adjustments, after which it moves directly into a Voice Activity Detection (VAD). VAD identifies active speech segments, driving automatic end-pointing and intelligent interruption handling. Following a user speech, when VAD detects silence, relevant API events trigger downstream Voice AI models to generate and deliver responses. If the user resumes speaking during the voice bot’s response generation, the pipeline seamlessly cancels the ongoing output and clears buffers, ensuring natural conversational turn-taking. In this scenario, background noises—such as music, traffic sounds, TVs, or nearby conversations—remain embedded within the audio stream, reaching the VAD module unfiltered. Because VAD is designed to detect human speech activity, these background sounds often cause false-positive speech detections. As a result, the VAD mistakenly interprets noise or background voices as active user speech, triggering unintended interruptions. These false triggers negatively impact turn-taking, a core component of natural, human-like conversational interactions. Here, by placing Krisp ...