Advancements in conversational AI are transforming real-time communication (RTC). We’ve enhanced our RTC stack with new audio functionalities to facilitate natural, human-to-bot conversations. A critical aspect of this development is the effective suppression of irrelevant side speech, noise, and echo, which is vital for an always-on AI companion to avoid interruptions from background sounds or concurrent conversations. While humans instinctively differentiate foreground and background speech, generative AI bots necessitate deliberate system design to achieve this. Our approach tackles this challenge comprehensively, prioritizing distraction minimization and seamless bot interaction.