How to pause and resume an agent during a LiveKit session?

[wahidnj]

I’m using the LiveKit Agent and would like to temporarily pause and later resume an agent’s activity (for example, stop it from responding/transcribing for a while, then continue the same session).

My questions are:

1. Is there an existing method or recommended pattern to pause the agent without disconnecting or ending the session?
2. Can we safely resume it later using the same context or conversation state?

[tinalenguyen]

Hi, I think the best practice at this moment is to save the context/conversation history before "pausing," and load it back in to "unpause." I believe you do have to end the session since it needs an active agent running. What is your use case for this?

[wahidnj]

When multiple participants join the same room, I want the agent to pause so the participants can talk to each other. Once the additional participants leave, the agent should resume the conversation with the first participant who started the call.
Thats why i want to know is there any pause and unpause function. I do not find any in docs.

[tinalenguyen]

Will the agent need the context from the conversation with multiple participants? There isn't a pause/unpause function at the moment for AgentSession. I think one thing you can try is keeping track of the original participant ID, and when multiple participants join, the context is saved and stored and the agent leaves. Then when the room only has one participant and the initial ID matches, the agent joins in with the original chat context loaded

[davidzhao]

I think the simplest way to accomplish this is to disable input: https://docs.livekit.io/agents/build/text/#toggle-audio