Timeouts & Limits

The Timeouts & Limits card covers three things that aren't about what the agent says, but about the shape of the call around it: Idle behavior, for when the caller goes quiet for longer than a pause; Call limits, bounds on how long the call itself may run; and Reliability, knobs for how the agent's back end recovers from failures. All three have defaults that work; there's nothing you have to set here for a new agent.

The card is on the Wrap Up step of the agent editor. The Reliability fields sit behind the slider button in the card's header, which opens them in a side panel.

Idle behavior

Idle behavior is different from ordinary turn-taking pauses (tuned on the Voice & Speech card): it covers stretches where the caller goes quiet for far longer than a mid-sentence pause — long enough that they may have set the phone down or lost the line. It's off by default, so no existing agent starts hanging up on deploy.

Turn it on and set:

Silence before the agent speaks up — how long the caller can stay quiet before idle triggers. 1,000–300,000 ms (1 second – 5 minutes). Default 10,000 ms.

When the caller goes quiet — what happens the first time idle triggers. Reprompt the caller speaks the idle prompt and waits again; End the call speaks it as a farewell and hangs up. Default Reprompt the caller.

Idle prompt — what the agent says. Up to 500 characters. Required for Reprompt the caller: a reprompt with nothing to speak never re-arms its timer, so idle would trigger once and then stay quiet for the rest of the call. Optional for End the call — leave it empty and the agent hangs up without saying anything.

Reprompts before giving up — how many times in a row idle can trigger, each one reprompting, before falling through to After reprompts are exhausted. 0–5. Default 2. Setting this to 0 means the very first idle period goes straight to that fallback, and because nothing reprompts, the Idle prompt is never spoken. Pair 0 with Keep the call going and idle does nothing at all; turn idle off instead.

After reprompts are exhausted — once the reprompt count runs out: End the call hangs up; Keep the call going stays on the line without reprompting again. The count only resets when the caller speaks. Default End the call.

Disposition — recorded on the call when idle ends it. Must be one of this agent's own dispositions. Only paths that end the call record it, so Reprompt the caller paired with Keep the call going never does: the reprompts stop and the call carries on.

Call limits

Bounds on the call itself, regardless of what's being said.

Maximum call duration — the call ends automatically once this elapses. 60,000–7,200,000 ms (1 minute – 2 hours). Leave it blank for no limit.

Warning lead time — how long before the max duration the warning prompt is spoken. 5,000–300,000 ms, and must be shorter than the max duration itself. Requires a max call duration to be set.

Warning prompt — what the agent says when the warning lead time is reached. Up to 500 characters. Required whenever a warning lead time is set, and it requires one in return: the warning timer is armed only when both are present, so either on its own is never spoken.

Reliability tuning

Failure-handling knobs for the agent's back end, in the Reliability panel this card's header opens. Don't confuse this section with Conversation history on the Brain card, which governs how message history is retained rather than how failures are handled; the names are similar but the two live on different cards. Every field falls back to a built-in default when left blank, so an agent that never touches this section behaves exactly as it always has.

Consecutive failures before giving up — how many turns in a row can fail (a dropped model response, an unrecoverable error) before the agent gives up and ends the call. 1–10. Default 3.

Tool timeout — how long a tool call may run before it's treated as failed. 1,000–20,000 ms. Default 15,000 ms. The ceiling is 20,000 because the agent stops waiting on a tool result at that point regardless. Lowering this also lowers the cap on the capture digits tool's overall timeout, which has to stay at least a second inside it.

Steering judge timeout — how long the steering rules judge may take to rule on a tool call before it's skipped for that turn. 500–10,000 ms. Default 2,000 ms.

Handoff history depth — how many recent messages ride along when the call hands off to a workflow. 1–200. Default 40.

Max retry attempts — how many attempts the agent makes against the language model before giving up on the turn. 1–6. Default 3.

Initial retry delay — how long the agent waits before the first retry, in milliseconds. 100–10,000. Default 1,000 ms.

Max retry delay — the ceiling the retry delay grows to as attempts continue, in milliseconds. 100–20,000. Default 4,000 ms. When you set both delays, the ceiling must be at least the initial delay, and a save that inverts them is rejected: a lower ceiling does not fail at runtime; it flattens every retry to the ceiling, and the initial delay you set never applies at all.

These three retry fields are a deliberate departure from the underlying SDK's own defaults of 6 attempts starting at 4,000 ms and growing to a 240,000 ms ceiling. Those numbers are sized for a batch job that can afford to wait; on a call or in a chat, that backoff is dead air followed by a failed turn anyway, so the platform ships a shorter default and lets you move it from there. They govern both voice and chat: the agent runs on the same underlying logic for either channel, so a retry setting configured here reaches chat turns too.

Limits and defaults

Troubleshooting

The agent hangs up on a caller who's still there, just quiet. Raise Silence before the agent speaks up, or switch After reprompts are exhausted to Keep the call going if a hang-up is too aggressive for this agent.

The idle prompt plays but the call keeps going past the reprompt count. Check After reprompts are exhausted — Keep the call going is working as configured; switch it to End the call if that's not what you want.

Save rejects the warning lead time. Warning lead time must be strictly less than Maximum call duration — lower the lead time or raise the max duration.

Save rejects a missing prompt. Warning lead time and Warning prompt require each other, and Reprompt the caller requires an Idle prompt — in each case the agent arms the timer only when there's something to speak, so the setting would otherwise save and never take effect. Write the missing half, or clear the setting that needs it. End the call is the one exception: it needs no prompt, because hanging up in silence still ends the call.

The call ends with no warning. Warning lead time and Warning prompt both require a Maximum call duration to be set; the warning does nothing without a duration to warn ahead of.

The agent gives up on a call after a string of tool or model errors. That's Consecutive failures before giving up doing its job. Raise it if a few transient failures shouldn't end the call, but a higher number also means callers wait through more failed turns before the agent gives up.

A handoff to a workflow seems to lose earlier context. Raise Handoff history depth — the default carries 40 recent messages; a long conversation before the handoff can lose earlier turns above that.

Next steps