What is turn taking in conversational AI: A guide to natural flow

This ElevenLabs guide explains turn taking in conversational AI as the rules that determine when a voice agent should reply, hold the floor, or stay silent, relying on adaptive timing, voice activity detection, and semantic analysis rather than strict silence timers. It describes how ElevenAgents detects speech, silence, and intent, handles interruptions and backchannels, and lets teams tune settings like turn eagerness and silence timeouts to avoid premature endpointing, dead air, and false triggers. It also covers measuring quality through interruption rate and response latency, citing a 142 ms median time from request to audible speech with Eleven v4 Turbo and a 200 ms average human turn gap from Journal of Cognition research.