Pre-ASR addressee gating for contact-center voice AI
Your agent hears the whole call.
A pre-ASR addressee gate cuts false escalations and cleans the signal for containment rate and handle time.
The failure
Your agent has no signal for who is addressing it.
A supervisor aside, a household voice, hold music: none of it is the customer. Each one can still trip an escalation.
At scale, even a low false-escalation rate degrades containment and inflates handle time.
The recognizer is not the problem. The missing piece is a decision, before ASR runs, about who a turn is addressed to.
false escalation
The supervisor aside becomes a customer command
A coaching whisper on a three-way bridge fires an escalation trigger. The call routes to a live agent.
In healthcare and financial lines, the misrouting creates compliance risk, not just noise.
false barge-in and missed interruption
Background speech stops the agent. Real interruptions get missed.
Hold music, a household voice, or a side conversation trips the VAD. The agent cancels its response mid-turn, pauses, then awkwardly resumes.
The real interruption that mattered gets buried in the same noise and missed. Handle time inflates, and the root cause is no addressee gate before ASR.
The fix
One hosted layer, before ASR, that decides who a turn is addressed to.
Supervisor asides, hold music, household voices, and side conversations are suppressed. Only turns addressed to the agent reach your existing runtime.
When Selective Auditory Attention (SAA) is uncertain, it fails closed and forwards nothing. No wake word, no GPU, no change to your ASR or LLM.
Research foundation
Published research on multi-party call audio.
Not just claimed: measured on held-out multi-party audio and published for scrutiny.
addressee precision
Reliable on the addressee decision, audio-only or with video
Measured on held-out multi-party sessions comparable to live call audio. Published at arXiv:2604.08412.
Fails closed under distribution shift.
latency
In real time, before ASR runs
The addressee decision returns before the recognizer processes any audio.
Fits inside a live call latency budget with no perceptible delay.
failure mode
Fails closed, not open
When SAA is uncertain, the default is silence. The turn is not forwarded to the agent runtime.
No false escalation can originate from a suppressed turn.
coverage
Multi-party call audio, several speakers at once
Works across three-way bridges and caller environments with background voices, with several speakers active at once.
signal model
Acoustic and prosodic signals, no language parsing
No wake word. Language-agnostic at the acoustic level.
Cross-lingual recall parity is a known open item, under active work.
deployment
Hosted cloud, DPA available, per-device licensing
SAA runs as a hosted service. Call audio streams to the inference endpoint; an addressee decision returns.
A Data Processing Agreement is available for regulated lines including healthcare and financial services.
Licensed per device, not per call.
How it integrates
One SDK call between your call transport and ASR. Nothing else changes.
Thin client SDKs in JavaScript/TypeScript and Python. LiveKit, Pipecat, and Twilio transports supported.
Audio in from your existing transport
Audio from your phone transport or CPaaS bridge streams to SAA before ASR runs.
No change to your transport, microphone configuration, or telephony stack.
Addressee decision per voice turn
SAA analyzes acoustic and prosodic signals for each voice turn. No wake word required. No GPU required.
In real time it decides whether the turn is addressed to the agent, or to someone else on the bridge or in the caller's room.
Route only addressed turns to your agent
Only turns addressed to the agent reach your ASR and agent runtime. Supervisor asides, hold music, household voices, and side conversations are suppressed.
Under uncertainty SAA fails closed and forwards nothing.
Real-time on a live call, at scale
The agent's response rhythm stays the same. It just stops acting on the wrong speaker.
architecture
Pre-ASR, hosted, model-agnostic
Client SDKs stream audio to server.attentionlabs.ai and get an addressee decision before transcription starts. SAA sits in front of any ASR and any agent runtime you already run.
access
Free eval, one call type, one week.
Run SAA against audio from your own environment, or try the Cloud SDK first to get a feel.
Request an evalWhy the existing stack misses it
VAD and diarization tell you someone spoke. Not whether it was meant for the agent.
Four layers already sit in your pipeline. Only one answers the addressee question.
| Layer | What it answers | When it runs | Answers "is this turn addressed to the agent?" |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy-threshold VAD + endpointing | Is someone speaking? Has the turn ended? | Pre-ASR | No |
| Noise suppression and AEC | Is the audio cleaner? | Pre-ASR | No |
| Speaker diarization | Who spoke and when, after the fact? | Post-ASR | No |
| Voice biometrics / caller authentication | Is this a known enrolled voice? | Post-ASR | No |
| SAA addressee detection | Is this turn addressed to the agent, right now? | Pre-ASR, in real time | Yes |
- Layer
- Energy-threshold VAD + endpointing
- What it answers
- Is someone speaking? Has the turn ended?
- When it runs
- Pre-ASR
- Answers "is this turn addressed to the agent?"
- No
- Layer
- Noise suppression and AEC
- What it answers
- Is the audio cleaner?
- When it runs
- Pre-ASR
- Answers "is this turn addressed to the agent?"
- No
- Layer
- Speaker diarization
- What it answers
- Who spoke and when, after the fact?
- When it runs
- Post-ASR
- Answers "is this turn addressed to the agent?"
- No
- Layer
- Voice biometrics / caller authentication
- What it answers
- Is this a known enrolled voice?
- When it runs
- Post-ASR
- Answers "is this turn addressed to the agent?"
- No
- Layer
- SAA addressee detection
- What it answers
- Is this turn addressed to the agent, right now?
- When it runs
- Pre-ASR, in real time
- Answers "is this turn addressed to the agent?"
- Yes
CCaaS and CX teams whose containment rate depends on answering the right person.
Common questions
What CCaaS and CX platform teams ask before integrating.
Why do contact-center voice agents falsely escalate?
When a supervisor coaches the customer mid-call, or ambient room noise reaches the channel, the agent runtime has no signal that the turn was not addressed to it.
Energy-threshold VAD fires on any sound above a noise floor, and the escalation trigger fires on content it was never meant to receive.
The root cause is not the escalation classifier: it is a missing decision about who a turn is addressed to. SAA adds that decision before ASR runs.
How is SAA different from our VAD plus endpointing model?
VAD answers whether someone is speaking. SAA answers whether that speech is addressed to the agent.
VAD fires on hold music, background conversation, and a supervisor's coaching aside. None of that carries an addressee signal.
SAA is the classification layer above your VAD. It is a single SDK integration that does not change your ASR or LLM.
How does SAA handle supervisor barge-in and 3-way calls?
On a three-way bridge, SAA classifies each voice turn by addressee in real time, before ASR runs.
A supervisor's whisper is tagged as not addressed and withheld. A turn directed at the agent is forwarded.
When SAA is uncertain, it fails closed and withholds the audio. The agent runtime receives only turns addressed to it.
Is audio sent to the cloud, and is there a DPA for regulated lines?
SAA is a hosted cloud service. Call audio streams through the client SDK to server.attentionlabs.ai and an addressee decision returns in real time.
SAA fails closed: unaddressed and uncertain audio is never passed onward. A Data Processing Agreement is available for regulated deployments.
How fast is the evaluation and what does it measure?
The evaluation tier is free. A typical single-call-type evaluation runs in one week and includes API keys, an eval kit, and the client SDK.
You run SAA against audio from your own call types and receive per-turn addressee decisions.
The evaluation measures false-escalation reduction, per-turn addressee precision, and decision latency, all on your own audio.
How is SAA licensed for high call volume?
SAA is licensed per device, not per call and not metered by call volume.
Contact-center platform teams typically start with one call type and expand across the fleet after a successful evaluation.
Request an eval to run SAA on your own call audio, or book a call to discuss commercial terms.
Get in touch
Book a call or run an eval on your own call audio.
Tell us about your call types and what you are trying to fix: false escalation rate, handle time, or compliance on a regulated line.
Related: how to reduce false triggers in voice AI · what background speech costs a voice agent
Last updated June 26, 2026