This article handles the role of prosodic and phonetic features in talk, centering on how to recognize rival overlaps in conversations. It has formerly been asserted that turn competition may be discernible from non-competitive overlaps, based on phonetic/prosodic characteristics alone. This article tests this hypothesis on recordings from a UK-based call center, rallying a conversation analytic approach with quantitative methods employing a coding scheme. The authors' long-term goal is to evolve large-scale methods operationalizing what we know about conversational sequence and social actions into speech technological applications. Our findings show that, although there is a tendency for competitive overlaps to be more prominent in terms of loudness and pitch features than non-competitive overlaps, this difference is not sufficient to reliably identify turn competitions from the speech signal itself. We discuss the findings in relation to observations made in individual examples, and conclude by highlighting some of the methodological challenges of applying findings from the linguistic and conversation analytic literature to speech technologies.