TroubleshootingCall Quality

Voice Agent Call Quality Issues

Diagnose robotic audio, slow responses, dropped calls, and transcript problems with targeted fixes in Talkturo voice settings and logs.

Symptoms

Call quality issues usually show up in one of a few repeatable patterns. Match what you are hearing or seeing first, then jump to the relevant section below.

  • Assistant responses sound robotic or unnatural
  • Call audio has static, hiss, or background noise
  • Assistant takes too long to respond
  • Calls drop or end unexpectedly
  • Transcript accuracy is poor for names, acronyms, or domain-specific terms
  • Voicemail detection behaves unexpectedly

Most call quality problems come from configuration, not a platform outage. Check the assistant's Voice, STT, and telephony settings first, then use call logs to confirm where latency or call termination happened.

Troubleshoot by symptom

Start in the Voice tab of your assistant settings. The fastest improvement usually comes from changing the text-to-speech provider or voice model rather than rewriting prompts.

Check these settings in order:

  • TTS provider — switch between Cartesia, ElevenLabs, and Inworld to compare naturalness.
  • Speed — if speech sounds rushed or dragged out, adjust the speed setting. The supported range is 0.5 to 2.0, and the default is 1.0.
  • Voice model or voice ID — some voices handle pacing, emphasis, and pronunciation better than others.
  • Noise cancellation — enable bvc for Background Voice Cancellation or nc for Standard noise cancellation. Avoid off unless you are testing raw input quality.

If only certain phrases sound wrong, test with a different voice before changing your prompt. Voice quality issues often come from the synthesis model, not the conversation logic.

What to check in call logs

Call logs help you confirm whether the issue comes from speech recognition, model latency, voice synthesis, or call termination logic.

Use call logs to answer these questions:

  • Which stage is slow: EOU, LLM, or TTS
  • Whether high latency affects all calls or only outliers through P50 and P95
  • Why the call ended by checking the ended reason field
  • Whether transcript errors are isolated to specific terms or happen across the entire call

When one symptom overlaps with another, fix the earliest point in the pipeline first. For example, poor transcripts can make the assistant respond slowly or incorrectly, even when your voice settings are fine.

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