Interruption handling
Interruption handling is how a voice agent behaves when the caller speaks while it is still talking: whether it notices, how quickly it stops, and what it does with what the caller said.
Also called: interrupt handling, talk-over handling
Callers interrupt for good reasons, the agent is reading options they do not need, it misheard them, or they already know what they want. Handling that well has three parts: detecting the interruption (barge-in, in the speech-AI sense), stopping output promptly rather than finishing the sentence, and treating the interruption as the caller’s next turn instead of discarding it.
The hard cases are the false alarms. A cough, a "mm-hm", or someone speaking in the background should not stop the agent; a genuine "no, not that one" should. Systems differ in how they tell these apart and how they recover, some resume where they left off, some re-plan the reply.
Note the vocabulary: barge-in here means the caller interrupting the AI. Barge in the telephony sense means a supervisor joining a live call, which is an unrelated feature that happens to share the word.