Neither call-start mode handles a natural outbound pickup:
- Agent speaks first +
begin_message_delay_ms: fixed timer — anyone answering with more than a short “hello” (common in our market: name + greeting) gets talked over. - User speaks first: the opener runs through the full STT → LLM → TTS chain, adding 1–2s of dead air, so people say “hello?” again or hang up. Your own telemetry in this support thread shows 2.8–4.4s to first agent word on live pickups — and the suggested workarounds are still just timer tuning.
Request: pre-synthesize the begin_message (as agent-speaks-first already does), but gate playback on end-of-speech detection instead of a fixed timer, with a max-wait fallback if the callee stays silent. The callee’s opening words never change what the first message should be, so no LLM turn is needed — just wait, then play instantly.
Half of this already exists: conversation flows have begin_after_user_silence_ms (silence gating), but the first message still pays LLM latency there. Combining silence gating with the pre-synthesized begin_message would give every outbound call a natural pickup: no talk-over, no first-turn dead air.