5 Voice Agent Failure Modes You'll Hit in Week One — Venky B, Plivo

Collecting a phone number by voice works differently from transcribing an ordinary sentence. This production-engineering talk proposes defining the field's expected shape before asking for it, then validating the answer against that shape. An unexpected letter or incorrect length becomes a specific problem the system can correct or ask the caller to resolve.

The same approach makes evaluation more precise: test whether each field was collected correctly, rather than judging only whether the overall conversation sounded successful. It gives developers a concrete place to detect and repair data-entry failures before the captured value moves further through the workflow.