We are implementing Genesys Dialog Engine Bot Flows over our BYOC Local SIP trunks. We observe a consistent 1.5 to 2-second delay before the bot audio begins playing, resulting in the first word of the greeting being clipped. SIP PCAPs show the 200 OK and ACK complete normally, but the RTP media stream for the bot audio is delayed. Has anyone encountered this early media clipping with voice bots on local edges?
I can confirm that this is a recognized architectural behavior when utilizing BYOC Local appliances in conjunction with cloud-native conversational AI services. Because the Dialog Engine resides entirely in the Genesys Cloud media region, your on-premises Edge must negotiate the RTP stream back up to the cloud before media can be established for the bot. To mitigate this latency, we implemented a brief 1.5-second silence node at the very beginning of the Architect Inbound Call Flow, immediately prior to invoking the ‘Call Dialog Engine Bot’ action.
This provides the Edge sufficient time to establish the secure SRTP tunnel.
That audio clipping is so frustrating! I evaluate hundreds of calls every week, and whenever the bot clips the greeting, the customer gets confused and immediately asks to speak to a representative. It ruins the containment rate. Adding the silence node is exactly what our routing team did, and it made a huge difference.
However, I want to point out one additional thing you should watch out for. When you add that silence in Architect, it will show up as dead air on the voice recording when my quality analysts listen to the interaction.
To fix this, make sure your bot transcript mapping is properly labeled so we can see that the silence was intentional platform latency, rather than an agent or system failure!
Building upon the previous recommendations, if you eventually transition to a third-party bot provider such as Google Dialogflow CX or Amazon Lex via the AudioHook integration, you will face similar initialization latency. In our enterprise environment, we use MuleSoft to orchestrate backend data dips while the call is routing. We intentionally utilize that 2-second SIP negotiation window to execute our REST API queries against our CRM.
By the time the bot media tunnel is fully established and the audio begins, our system has already retrieved the customer profile, allowing the bot to greet them by name. It is highly advisable to run your backend initialization in parallel with the media setup.