Why this is a common failure point
Turn-taking is the hardest part of a voice conversation to get right. People say “mm-hm” while listening, cut in to correct a detail, and start talking before the agent has finished. An agent that stops at every listening noise sounds broken; one that talks straight through a correction books the wrong thing. Scripted test callers wait politely for their turn, so neither failure shows up in testing.How Roark tests it
Interruption handling runs the same flow with callers who interrupt more and more, from never to constantly. It grades both directions of every overlap: whether the agent stopped when it should have (and kept going when it should have), and whether it cut the caller off. 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
Backchannel only callers make listening noises (“mm-hm”, “right”) without trying to take the turn, so the agent should keep talking. Occasional and Heavy callers genuinely cut in.
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
- Backchannel only is the trap. An agent that stops every time it hears “mm-hm” fails here and nowhere else. Barge-in yield failures on this value point at over-sensitive turn-taking.
- Rates, not counts. A Heavy caller interrupts far more often, so counts rise by construction. The rates say whether each interruption was handled worse.
- A single slip never fails a call. Every check allows one mistake per call, so a value marked worse means repeated mishandling.
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.