why does it try and act like a human and cough

[severe swan]

we

[autumn marsh]

Hi @severe swan. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:

---

There isn’t much in the knowledge sources that directly explains “coughing,” but there is one relevant piece about unintended sounds in voice/Realtime modes.

OpenAI notes that in Realtime / Voice-style models, the AI can sometimes generate unintended audio artifacts such as background music, humming, rhythmic noises, or sound-like artifacts, and that these can be distracting or feel unprofessional.[Background music] It doesn’t explicitly mention coughing, but coughing would fall into the same category: non-verbal, human-like sounds that aren’t actually needed to answer you.

Because these models are trained on large amounts of human speech and text, they can sometimes imitate human-like patterns (including filler sounds or other artifacts) when generating audio. OpenAI’s guidance is to suppress that behavior by adding instructions like:

- Do not include any sound effects or onomatopoeic expressions in your responses.

to reduce those kinds of sounds in Realtime audio responses.[Background music]

So, if it “acts like a human and coughs,” that’s an unintended side effect of how the audio model generates speech, not a deliberate attempt to pretend to be human, and OpenAI recommends prompt instructions to avoid it.

Note: you can ask me a follow up question by @ mentioning me again :speech_balloon:

@severe swan Kapa.ai is still learning and improving, please let me know how I did by reacting below.