When someone asks “Can you hear me?” at the start of a call, they are usually checking whether the other person—or the system—is present and receiving audio. In the implementation described here, the assistant instead treated the words as an information request and returned a page description or “No results found.” The mismatch was not the wording alone; it was the system assigning the wrong conversational purpose to it.
Why a question-shaped sentence can be the wrong kind of question
Voice systems cannot reliably choose an action from sentence form alone. “Can you hear me?” is grammatically a question, but in a call it often functions as a contact check: the speaker wants confirmation that the audio is getting through. Sending that utterance to search or page-description handling can produce an answer that is technically related to words in the request but irrelevant to the moment.
This is a specific dialogue-system implementation problem, not a claim that every voice assistant responds this way. The same distinction arises with “Just a moment, please.” That phrase manages the pace of a conversation; it is not a request to find or summarize a page.
Classify the conversational act before choosing a response
The system described in the article began with a four-category schema that did not provide a clear place for contact checks or hold statements. Its author says the categories were expanded using ISO 24617-2. The standard’s category definitions were not independently verified here, so the examples below describe the article’s implementation rather than a definitive account of the standard.
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- Contact check: “Can you hear me?” seeks confirmation that the listener or system is present and receiving the utterance. The implementation assigns it to Contact Management and uses a brief acknowledgment such as “Yes, I can hear you.”
- Turn management or hold: “Just a moment, please” signals a pause or asks the other party to wait. The implementation assigns it to Turn Management/Hold and gives a response such as “Yes, I’m waiting.”
- Information-seeking task: A request for an explanation or other substantive information should still be handled as a task. It should not be mistaken for a contact check merely because it contains a similar word or phrase.
The response should fit the act: a contact check calls for confirmation, and a hold statement calls for acknowledgment. The OpenAI Model Spec’s voice-mode example for audio testing uses the short response, “I can hear you. Can you hear me?” OpenAI Model Spec.
Match the whole utterance, not a stray fragment
A simplistic rule that triggers on a word such as “working?” risks intercepting a genuine troubleshooting question—for example, one asking whether a feature is working. The article describes two safeguards: match the whole utterance rather than a fragment, and exclude explanatory phrasing that indicates an information-seeking request.
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It also describes handling a Japanese discourse marker without splitting the utterance incorrectly. That matters because a rule that works only by matching an English-looking fragment can misclassify speech when conversational markers or language-specific phrasing are present. These are reported design choices, not evidence of performance across languages.
What the reported test does—and does not—show
The article reports testing against 180 real utterances, including 3 intended cases, with 0 false positives. It does not provide enough method or corpus detail to determine how those utterances were selected, how the labels were assigned, or how the system would perform on other speech acts, languages, users, or datasets. No independent replication was established. The counts therefore describe that reported test only; they are not a general accuracy claim.
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Use wording that fits the call
If you are asking a person on a phone call whether your audio is reaching them, “Can you hear me?” is a natural, direct check. An online language Q&A makes a related usage distinction: “Can you hear me?” checks whether audio reaches the listener, while “Can you listen to me?” can ask for attention. That is user-contributed usage guidance, not an official rule. English Language & Usage Stack Exchange.
The same phrase can also serve as a setup check in a voice-assistant demonstration. A 2021 study describes an experimenter saying “Alexa, can you hear me?” before inviting a child to interact with Alexa; that supports its use in that experiment, not a universal pattern. Frontiers in Psychology.
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