What do you do when the AI avatar on stage goes silent or gets it wrong?

01No answer

It was addressed and still says nothing

After the call, the stage goes quiet, and the moderator wants to fill the silence. Better to wait. As long as the moderator keeps talking, the AI avatar waits for the end of the question, and every rephrasing pushes its entrance further back. Expect about two seconds of silence before its first sound, occasionally more.

After that, a real glitch shows in two places at once. No German “Also.” (“Well.”) or “Hm.” comes from the speaker, and no text appears on the tablet. Then the moderator calls it again, name and question in one go.

The check on whether the avatar was the one being addressed did not finish in time, and it said nothing. When the moderator called it by name and asked what it thought, it answered. So the second call saved the question.

If it still says nothing after the second call, the question reaches it through the tablet, either as the last sentence spoken, with one tap, or as a few typed words.

02Causes

Why a question doesn’t get through to it

In one live test, a question waited eighteen seconds for its answer. It opened with the avatar’s name, but speech recognition delivered the name and the rest as two pieces, and the rest, without the name, went nowhere. Taking a breath after the name is fine. If nothing follows, call it a second time.

The moderator can catch other causes by ear. If the question came in dialect or in English, the moderator repeats it in standard German with the name in front. If a follow-up without the name came after the AI avatar’s short conversation window had closed, the moderator asks it again with the name.

Sometimes the silence is right. If its name comes up only in passing, say because a guest refers to one of its arguments, that is not a call. If it should respond, the moderator asks it directly.

03Wrong answer

An answer misses the mark

All the room hears of a stop is half a sentence, and nobody needs to explain it. The moderator already saw the digression coming on the tablet, taps STOP and gives the floor to a guest.

If the question is still worth it, the moderator asks it a second time, narrower and with the length built in, for example “Albert, wer trägt am Ende das Risiko, in einem Satz?” (“Albert, who carries the risk in the end, in one sentence?”). It sticks to that kind of instruction.

04Similar name

A late guest’s name sounds almost like the character’s

Similar names on the guest list get checked early, when the character is chosen and before the invitations go out. The tricky case is a guest who joins shortly before the start and has a name close to the character’s. When the moderator calls that guest by name, it can set off the AI avatar. The moderator then stops it as soon as it begins and turns to the guest with one line, something like “That question was for you, not for our AI avatar.”

05Internet

If the internet goes down, the moderator needs a ready-made line

Without internet the AI avatar stays silent. For that moment the moderator has a line practiced in advance. A good one names the gap and, in the same breath, passes the open question to a guest.

With the question from earlier, it might sound like this: “Our AI avatar can’t be reached right now, so the question goes to you. Who carries the risk in the end?” Write this line down before the event, using a question from your own run of show. Then nobody has to invent it on stage.