Voice AI Glossary
Clear definitions for the terms that come up when an AI answers your business phone: the speech-processing plumbing (barge-in, voice activity detection), the call-handling moves (warm transfer), and the systems it replaces (IVR menus). Each entry explains the concept, why it matters on a real call, and how Tilk handles it.
Barge-in
Barge-in is the ability of a phone system to detect when a caller starts speaking while a prompt or agent is still talking, and to stop and listen instead of making the caller wait.
Voice Activity Detection (VAD)
Voice activity detection (VAD) is a signal-processing technique that decides, moment to moment, whether an audio stream contains human speech or just silence and background noise.
Warm Transfer
A warm transfer is a call handoff where the person passing the call first speaks to the receiving party, shares who is calling and why, and then connects them.
IVR vs AI Receptionist
An IVR (interactive voice response) is an automated phone menu that routes callers with recorded prompts and keypad presses.
More terms ship every week: ASR, text-to-speech, endpointing, SIP, call deflection, and the rest of the voice-AI stack. Want the concept applied to your business? See how an AI receptionist works .
Written by People Who Ship Voice Agents
Most glossary pages copy a definition off Wikipedia and stop there. These entries come from building and running AI phone agents in production, so each one connects the textbook definition to what actually happens on a live call: where latency shows up, why a caller talks over the agent, and when a machine should hand off to a human.
Definitions are grounded in the underlying standards and technology, not marketing. Where a term maps to something Tilk does, we say exactly what the product does today, no more.
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