Real-Time Voicemail Detection in Telephony Audio Using Temporal Speech Activity Features

Outbound AI calling systems must distinguish voicemail greetings from live human answers in real time to avoid wasted agent interactions and dropped calls. We present a lightweight approach that extracts 15 temporal features from the speech activity pattern of a pre-trained neural voice activity detector (VAD), then classifies with a shallow tree-based ensemble. Across two evaluation sets totaling 764 telephony recordings, the system achieves a combined 96.1% accuracy (734/764), with 99.3% (139/140) on an expert-labeled test set and 95.4% (595/624) on a held-out production set. In production validation over 77,000 calls, it maintained a 0.3% false positive rate and 1.3% false negative rat...

<iframe src="https://silytics.si/embed/item/fb48b712-ef03-49c4-9dd3-61e8033df35a" width="420" height="190" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Silytics entry"></iframe>

Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.