How to make agent wait for 5 rings before answering

Support Help
1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to set up my Retell phone agent so that it only answers after 5 rings (approximately 20-25 seconds), giving the client a chance to answer the call themselves first. If they don’t answer, the Retell agent should then pick up and capture the caller’s details.

My setup:

  • Phone number imported from Twilio into Retell

  • Twilio handles the inbound call and routes to Retell

  • Agent is a conversational flow agent

What I need: I want the phone to ring for about 20-25 seconds (5 rings) before Retell answers. Currently the agent answers almost immediately.

What I have tried:

  • I can see there is no obvious delay setting in the Retell agent settings

  • I am not sure if this needs to be configured in Twilio or in Retell

My questions:

  • Is there a way to add a ring delay before the agent answers?

  • Should this be configured in Twilio or in Retell?

  • If it’s in Twilio, what is the correct way to set this up?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

2

Hello @okaforcrmexpert

There are two approaches you can use:

1. ring_duration_ms (Retell setting)

Retell supports a ring_duration_ms agent override. You can set this to ~20000–25000 ms. This can be configured via the inbound webhook response under agent_override.agent.ring_duration_ms, or potentially in the agent settings directly.

2. Inbound Webhook Delay

You can use “Pause the call to pick it up with some delay.” While the webhook response is not received, the call stays in a ringing state. So you could add a deliberate delay (e.g., sleep(20)) in your webhook handler before responding — the caller will hear ringing during that time.

Recommended approach: Use the inbound webhook on your Retell number. In your webhook server, wait 20–25 seconds before returning the 200 response with the agent ID. During that delay, the caller hears ringing, giving your client time to answer first. If the client doesn’t answer, your webhook responds and Retell picks up.

You can see more detail bout this here (Inbound webhook - Retell AI)

Thank you