VICIdial AMD: Auto-Hang Up Fax and False-Answer Calls

Not every answered outbound call is worth an agent's attention. Fax machines, false answers, and calls that arrive with no audio at all clutter the agent queue and skew your numbers. With answering machine detection (AMD (answering machine detection)) route options you can hang these up automatically the instant they are recognized. This post covers the FAX, FAS, and no-audio hangup switches and when to use them.

Where these switches live

The hangup switches sit inside the settings container you open by enabling AMD Agent Route Options. That container normally holds status-response pairs, but it also accepts a few special lines that act as immediate-hangup rules. Because they live with your routing logic, you manage fax and false-answer handling in the same place you decide which detected calls reach agents.

The three options

• FAX-Hangup-ENABLED ends calls detected as a fax tone right away, which pairs with fax detection (Fax detection).
• FAS-Hangup-ENABLED ends false-answer calls, the ones a carrier marks answered when nobody really is.
• NOAUDIODATA-Hangup-ENABLED drops calls that reach the routing script carrying no audio data at all.

Each one stops a category of junk before it touches an agent. A fax screech in someone's ear, a dead line a false answer (Answer supervision) created, or a silent channel with nothing to work with: none of these become live conversations, so handing them straight to a hangup keeps agents on real calls.

How the filtering flows

flowchart TD
  A[Call reaches routing script] --> B{Detection result}
  B -->|Fax| C{FAX Hangup enabled}
  C -->|Yes| D[Hang up]
  B -->|False answer| E{FAS Hangup enabled}
  E -->|Yes| D
  B -->|No audio| F{NOAUDIODATA Hangup}
  F -->|Yes| D
  B -->|Human| G[Send to agent]

Why this helps your numbers

Letting fax and false answers ride through to agents inflates handle time and pollutes your reporting, because each one gets counted somewhere. Clearing them at the routing script means your real contact rate and call status (Status (lead status)) figures reflect actual conversations. It also reduces the chance an agent burns seconds on a screeching line before dispositioning it as junk.

Check the AMD Log Report under Admin Utilities to see how many fax, false-answer, and no-audio results your traffic produces. If those categories are common, enabling the matching switches is a quick win for queue quality.

As with the rest of the route options, these switches assume the Asterisk engine on an auto-dial method using ratio dialing (Ratio dialing) or similar, not manual mode. They also need AMD Agent Route Options enabled in the first place, since that is what opens the container the switches live in.

Turning them on safely

Add one switch at a time rather than enabling all three at once. Start with the category your log report shows as the biggest problem, make the change, and confirm your agent queue gets cleaner without losing real answers. Then add the next switch if the data still warrants it. A staged approach keeps you from blaming the wrong setting if something looks off.

The NOAUDIODATA switch deserves a special mention. A call that reaches the routing script with no audio at all is almost never a person you can talk to, so dropping it is usually safe. Still, if your carrier or lines produce odd timing, verify with the log report that no-audio results really are dead calls before you enable an automatic hangup on them.

Used well, these three switches act as a quiet filter at the door, letting only calls worth answering through to your team while everything else ends before it costs anyone time.

For the wider context on detection routing, read our AMD and CPD complete guide, and for the container these switches live in see AMD Agent Route Options.

A managed cluster ships with the routing script and settings containers in place, so turning on fax and false-answer hangups is a checkbox-level change rather than a server build. See VICIfast pricing to get a cleaner agent queue from the start.