Why this is a common failure point
Real callers ring from cars, trains, kitchens and busy streets. Background noise hides parts of what they say, and noise that contains other voices (a cafe, an airport, children playing) can be transcribed as if the caller said it. The agent answers words nobody spoke, or stops mid-sentence because it thinks it was interrupted. Agents tested in a quiet office never meet any of this.How Roark tests it
Background noise robustness runs the same flow with the caller in each environment you pick, from silence to a construction site. The caller is identical in every value: only the sound around them changes, so the report shows what each background costs your agent. It is a property sweep: every value runs the same flow with everything else held the same, and the report tells you which values did worse than the rest and which differences are just chance.The values
Values are ordered from quietest to loudest, which is also how the report lists them.
What it measures
The template seeds these, and your flow’s own metrics run alongside them. Only checks can mark a value Worse on; the other measures explain why.What to look for
- Missed responses. Noise that hides the caller’s speech shows up as turns the agent never answered, not only as misunderstandings.
- Noise with voices in it. Cafes, airports and children playing are harder than loud but steady noise like a train.
- False interruptions. An agent that stops mid-sentence for background sound should also be run through Interruption handling.
Setting one up
Pick the flow to test, then the values to run it across. Every value starts selected; deselect the ones you don’t need. Each value runs your flow again, so the values you keep are the cost of the run. Compared against sets the baseline: a reference value the report pins first, such as silence for background noise. The template suggests the natural one, and you can change it or choose none. It doesn’t change the verdict: whether a value did worse is always decided against every other value combined. Iterations live in the sweep panel rather than in Advanced. Each value runs every attached test case once per iteration:Calls per value = test cases x iterationsEach value needs at least 5 calls to be compared with the others, and the Iterations field won’t go below the count that reaches it. It starts at 6 calls per value, so one call excluded after the run doesn’t drop a value out of the comparison. More calls let the report see smaller differences. For a sweep of 10 values:
Below 5 calls a value can never be flagged, however badly it does, which is why the minimum is enforced rather than suggested. Over the API, a sweep template defaults
iterationCount to 6 and refuses a plan with fewer than 5 calls per value with a 400.How the results are decided
The sweep’s table leads the run report. Its Compared with the rest column gives each value one result:
How “too large to be chance” is decided:
- Each value is compared with all the other values combined, one check at a time, never with a single other value. Two values that happen to land at opposite ends are not a finding on their own.
- A sweep makes many comparisons at once (every value on every check), and some will look different by luck alone. The report accounts for that: of all the values it flags in a run, at most 1 in 10 is expected to be a fluke.
- A value is flagged only when it does worse. Doing better than the rest is not a problem to fix.