Glossary

The vocabulary around phone agents, defined plainly. Telephony has a lot of shorthand, most of it older than the software using it.

• Barge-in

  Barge-in is when a caller interrupts an automated voice while it is still speaking, and the system stops talking and starts listening.

• Turn detection

  Turn detection is deciding when a caller has finished speaking and it is the agent’s turn to reply.

• Endpointing

  Endpointing is detecting the start and end boundaries of speech in an audio stream.

• SIP trunk

  A SIP trunk is a connection that carries phone calls over the internet between your telephony provider and another system.

• BYOC (bring your own carrier)

  BYOC means connecting your own telephony account to a platform rather than buying numbers from that platform.

• DID (direct inward dialling)

  A DID is a phone number that routes an outside caller to a specific destination without going through a switchboard.

• IVR (interactive voice response)

  An IVR is an automated phone menu that routes callers based on keypresses or short spoken commands.

• DTMF (touch tones)

  DTMF is the system of dual tones a phone sends when you press a key, used to pass digits through a call.

• Warm transfer

  A warm transfer is handing a call to a person while passing on the context, rather than dropping the caller into a fresh conversation.

• 10DLC

  10DLC is the US registration framework for sending application-to-person messages from ordinary ten-digit local numbers.

• STIR/SHAKEN

  STIR/SHAKEN is a set of standards that lets carriers cryptographically attest that a call is really coming from the number it claims.

• DNC (do not call)

  A do-not-call list records people who must not be contacted, and checking it before dialling is a legal requirement in many places.

• Latency budget

  A latency budget is the total time allowed between a caller finishing speaking and hearing a reply, divided across every step in between.

• STT (speech to text)

  Speech to text turns spoken audio into written words, in real time for a live phone call.

• TTS (text to speech)

  Text to speech turns written words into spoken audio, and is what gives a phone agent its voice.

• WebRTC

  WebRTC is a standard that lets browsers carry real-time audio and video without a phone number or a plugin.