Barge-in
The ability for a caller to interrupt a system while it's still speaking, rather than waiting out a full prompt before saying or pressing anything.
It's decades-old phone-system vocabulary, not a new idea for conversational AI — originally whether a caller could press a keypad number mid-prompt without waiting for a recording to finish. Speech barge-in, interrupting with words instead of a keypress, is considerably harder: a system has to keep genuinely listening for meaningful speech the entire time it's producing its own output.
A regular caller who's ordered the same thing forty times shouldn't have to sit through a full welcome message before saying “the usual, please.” A system without barge-in treats a first-time caller and a longtime regular identically.
The most common misunderstanding is assuming barge-in means the system simply stops talking and starts listening — a clean handoff, like a light switch. It's a genuinely harder real-time problem than that, and good design also means not stopping for every cough or background noise, which would make things worse, not better.
Letting a caller interrupt and be heard mid-response, rather than requiring a full prompt to finish, is part of the target design for how the voice system handles a call, covered on Calls.
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