How long will you wait for an AI agent before you give up on it?

Genuinely collecting numbers on this, because everyone I ask gives a different one and I suspect the honest answer is much lower than people admit.

I build real-time voice and face models, so waiting is the problem I stare at all day. The thing that surprised me is that the tolerance is not one number, it moves enormously depending on what the agent appears to be doing.

If it is silent, people bail in about two seconds. If it shows a spinner, maybe five. If it streams tokens so you can see it working, people will sit there for thirty and not complain. Same wait, wildly different patience, purely from feedback. And in a live voice conversation the budget collapses to a couple of hundred milliseconds, because silence in a conversation does not read as thinking, it reads as the thing being broken.

So what is yours? A rough number and what the agent was doing at the time.

Especially interested if you have watched real users rather than just yourself. We are all far more patient with our own products than anyone else is.