Ambience
The background sound bed on a call, and the typing sound that covers a tool lookup.
A silent line sounds dead. The Ambience section puts two sounds under the conversation so callers hear a live workplace, not a void.
| Sound | Runs | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Background audio | The whole call | On, at 40 percent |
| Typing sound | While the agent waits on a tool | Off |
Neither sound is speech. Nothing on this page changes the transcript or the model's context. Both settings belong to the draft and reach live calls when you publish.
Background audio
A looping office bed: quiet room tone from a call centre. On by default, with volume from 0 to 100 percent (default 40).
The bed is mixed into outbound audio and runs continuously: under the agent's speech, under the caller's turn, and through every silence. It does not duck when the agent talks.
Setting the level
Preview plays the clip in your browser at the current slider level. Use it to get close, then confirm on a real call: a phone line carries far less of the sound than a laptop speaker, so a bed that sounds right in the browser can be almost inaudible on a handset.
Too much ambience competes with the voice. A little reads as a real workplace.
Typing sound
A soft keyboard clack that plays while the agent waits for a tool to return. Off by default, and layered over the background bed, so it needs background audio switched on.
The overlay is deliberately louder than the bed: a caller should hear exactly when it starts and stops. That is the signal that someone is looking something up.
When it plays
Caller: "Can you check my account?"
[first tool of the turn goes in flight -> clacks fade in]
[last tool returns -> clacks fade out]
Agent: "Found it. You're paid up to the end of the month."- It fades in when the first tool of a turn goes in flight.
- It fades out when the last tool returns, and it fades out the same way if a tool is cancelled, for example because the caller talked over it.
One window, not one per tool
Concurrent or chained tools join the same window rather than restarting it.
If a slow tool sends an interim update and the agent speaks a short "still working on it" line, the clacks keep playing over that line, because the lookup has not finished.
When it is skipped
Tools whose effect the caller can already see are skipped. Sending a text message is the clear case: the message arrives on the caller's phone before the tool returns, so typing sounds after the fact read as theatre.
The overlay is reserved for lookups with real latency, such as an account search or a product query.
Why a sound and not a spoken line
The clacks are ambience, not an utterance: they cover the wait without touching turn-taking, and on the text channel nothing leaks into the transcript.
Plan for slow tools
The typing sound covers tool latency. If a tool is slow enough that a caller would notice, the answer is to make it faster, or to have the agent set expectations in its prompt, not to add speech in front of it.
Ambience and call recordings
The bed and the overlay are mixed in on the way out to the caller. The platform records both sides of that split.
| Recording | Contains |
|---|---|
| Clean | The conversation only, taken before the mix. No bed, no typing. |
| Ambient | The call exactly as the caller heard it, bed and typing included. |
The call detail page offers a playback toggle between the two. The ambient copy is only kept when ambience actually ran on that call. Live listening always carries the ambience.