What happens to a call with noise
Your voice agent turns what it hears into text and replies to that text. That step is called transcription. In a quiet place it works very well. With noise around, it gets harder.
Picture an insurance broker. A customer has just had a bump in their car and calls from the hard shoulder, with lorries going past. They need to give their name, the number plate and where they are. If the agent hears the traffic mixed in with the voice, it can get a letter of the plate or the name of the street wrong.
There is a second problem. While the agent is talking, it listens in case the customer cuts in, which is normal in a conversation. A loud noise or someone talking nearby can make it stop mid-sentence, as if it had been interrupted.
Lera has a setting for each problem. One cleans up what the agent hears. The other decides how much the customer has to say to cut in.
How Lera cleans up what your agent hears
Before your agent listens to the call, the sound goes through a filter that removes the noise and keeps the voice. Traffic, wind or a car engine stay out, and what reaches the agent is mostly what your customer says.
It is on for every agent, including the ones you already had. You do not need to do anything for it to work.
It only changes what the agent hears. Your customer hears the call as usual, and the agent’s voice is not touched.
It works on phone calls, on calls that come in from your website and on audio tests in the dashboard. Chat has no sound, so there is nothing to clean up there.
The three modes and when to use each
The setting is under Agents. Open your agent, go to the Voice & pacing section and, inside Fine voice settings, look for Clean up call noise. It has three options.
Remove background noise is the one that comes set. It removes noise and leaves voices alone. It is the right one for the street, the road or a building site, where the problem is noise rather than other people.
Remove background noise and voices does the same and also ignores anyone talking around your customer. On the hard shoulder, for example, the other driver, the tow truck driver or a passenger in the car. It also helps in a bar or a garage, where there is always someone talking nearby.
Leave as is passes the sound through as it arrives.
When you change it, save and publish the agent. It applies from the next call.
An Administrator or an Editor can change it. A Viewer can see it but cannot touch it. You can also ask Maite, the dashboard’s assistant, to change it for you.
Do not mix it up with Background sound, just above it. That one does the opposite, adding a subtle office ambience to what the caller hears, and it is off by default.
Stop it going quiet at every noise
Inside Voice & pacing, under Turn pacing, you will find Interruption sensitivity. It decides how much your customer has to talk over the agent before the agent stops and listens.
It is a slider from 0 to 1 and comes set at 0.6. Low holds through background noise. High lets the caller cut in right away. Next to it you can see, in milliseconds, how much speech it takes to cut in.
If you notice on noisy calls that your agent stops mid-sentence when nobody has said anything, lower it a little, to 0.4 for example, and test again.
Do not lower it too far. With the slider very low, the customer also finds it harder to stop the agent when they want to correct something, such as a misheard number plate.
The simplest approach is to start with the defaults and only touch this slider if you notice the problem on real calls.
If it still does not catch a detail
With a lot of noise, the odd word can slip through. Your agent comes with two rules switched on in the Behaviour section that help. With Ask for spelling, if it mishears a name, it asks for the spelling instead of guessing again. With Repeat back to confirm, it reads numbers and key details back before treating them as settled.
For the policy number, the most reliable option on a phone call is for the customer to type it on the keypad. Whatever is typed arrives exactly, without going through transcription, however much noise there is. If your agent works in steps, with a flow, tick «can be typed on the keypad» on the policy number, inside the step that collects it.
If there are words your agent must recognise no matter what, such as your brokerage’s name, the insurers you work with or the streets in your area, add them in the Vocabulary & pronunciation section, under Words to recognise better.
What it costs
Remove background noise, the default option, costs nothing extra.
Remove background noise and voices depends on how you pay. On pay as you go, it is charged separately, per minute, on top of your agent’s configuration price. Below the selector the dashboard shows how much is added, and in the Cost on the agent’s page it appears as one more line, Voice isolation.
If you take a plan, it is included in every plan and adds nothing. That minute counts like any other from what is included.
It is only charged when the clean-up has actually been applied on that call. If it ever cannot be applied, the call still comes in, with the sound uncleaned, and it is not charged.
How to test it
Inside your agent, press Test and choose the Audio tab. Talk to it with noise around you, for example with the window open onto a busy street. The test uses the same clean-up your calls will have.
Then publish and call your number from somewhere genuinely noisy, such as a main road or a bar. Notice whether it understands you first time and whether it goes quiet when it should not.
Afterwards, open that call in Call history. The transcript shows what the agent understood, word by word, so you know whether anything needs adjusting.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to switch anything on? No. Remove background noise is on for every agent.
Does my customer hear the call differently? No. The clean-up only changes what the agent hears. Your customer hears the call as usual.
Does it work on calls from my website? Yes, and on audio tests in the dashboard too. Chat has no sound, so it does not apply there.
Does removing background voices as well cost more? On pay as you go, yes, it is charged separately per minute. On a plan, it is included.
How much does it cost to try? €20 free credit, no card needed. Create your agent, call it from the street and hear how well it understands you.