how to wait for a custom action to finish?

I have a custom action with a twiml. In it I have a <say> tag that does some basic greeting and asks the caller to answer a question. Afterwards a there is a <recording> tag that starts to record the callers response. Lastly the response is sent to an external service for processing via a POST request (still withing the twiml). After the twiml custom action step I have a API step and a JS step, that together poll the external service to see if the call has been processed. The problem is that it looks like the API step is never triggered. Instead the twiml custom action block is hit, I get the greeting message, the call is recorded and I can see in the logs that the external service retrieved it, but then the polling never happens. Instead after about 2 minutes the twiml action gets retriggered and I get the greeting and recording again. What is the issue here? Is the twiml posting something back to the voiceflow project? How can I make sure that after the twiml step the API step is triggered?

W. Williams (SFT)•10/20/25, 5:53 PM

write a function. See the VF docs for how to do that.

W. Williams (SFT)•10/20/25, 5:53 PM

also, why not use VF to do the talking and LLM stuff?

rudispOP•10/22/25, 10:58 AM

@W. Williams (SFT) thanks for the function suggestion, will look into it. The models that voiceflow provides out of the box could not correctly transcribe the speech (it's in dutch), whilst googles stt model could. So I wanted to use it for the transcription, as was able to confirm that it does work, but then started facing issue when I wanted to get the transcription back in voiceflow.