Answering machine detection

The AMD card under Advanced: detect when voicemail picks up an outbound call, in any language, and how long to wait for a verdict.

Voice agents

Answering machine detection (AMD) tells voicemail apart from a person in the first seconds of an outbound call and lets the agent react accordingly, instead of holding a conversation with a greeting message and burning minutes.

The AMD card with Enable AMD and AMD timeout — The AMD card.

Configuring it

Open the agent and choose Advanced under Build.
In AMD, switch on Enable AMD.
Set AMD timeout.
Save.

Reference

Field	Default	Unit or options	Range	What it does
Enable AMD	Off	On, off		Detects voicemail and reacts accordingly
AMD timeout	60	s	10 to 240, step 1	Max time to wait for a detection signal before the call is treated as answered by a person

How it works

When the call connects, the detector listens for the patterns of a machine: a long uninterrupted greeting, a beep, silence after a beep. A person says a short “hello” and stops. The verdict arrives within AMD timeout; if none does, the agent carries on as with a person. A call flagged as a machine is not held as a conversation with the greeting; it ends, shows under Call Logs with its status, and the campaign’s retry policy decides whether to call again.

Choosing the timeout

The default is 60 s; an agent that stored another value before keeps it. Remember the agent is silent while it waits: a person who answers hears nothing until the verdict or the timeout. Lower it as far as your voicemail greetings allow.

Behaviour and limits

AMD applies to outbound calls. On inbound calls and the browser Call test it has nothing to detect.
Who talks first still applies: with Agent speaks first, the first message starts when the line opens, and AMD may end the call part way through it.
Detection works across languages, whatever the agent’s Language. There is no separate switch for it.

Verify

Run a small outbound campaign to a number that goes to voicemail. Under Call Logs, the call is short and the agent’s first message is not followed by a conversation with the greeting; the contact is retried or closed according to the campaign’s policy.

Troubleshooting

The agent talks to voicemail. Enable AMD is off, or AMD timeout ran out before a verdict: raise it.
People are hung up on. The detector mistook a long human greeting for a machine. Lower AMD timeout does not help here; check the recording and, if it recurs on one line, turn AMD off for that agent.