5 Voice Agent Failure Modes You'll Hit in Week One

Official Schedule Context

Building a voice agent that demos well is easy now. The hard part starts the second a real person

calls it. Most voice agents today are basically a chatbot with a microphone bolted on, they listen,

then think, then talk, one side at a time, like a walkie talkie. Real conversations don't work that

way. People pause in the middle of a thought, they say "um" and "uh", they talk over you, they

change their mind halfway through. The agent has to work out when you're actually done talking, when

it should stop talking, and when you've said something it cannot afford to get wrong, like your

phone number or email. None of this shows up when you test with text. All of it shows up in week

one. This talk is the five failures that hit every team in that first week, the ones we see again

and again. For each case we will walk though examples and best practices for what actually breaks

and what to do about it. If you're about to put a voice agent in front of real callers, or you

already did and it's quietly falling apart, this is the talk that saves you the weeks everyone else

burns figuring it out

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