VICIdial AMD Statuses Explained: HUMAN, NOTSURE and More

Every answered call on an AMD-enabled campaign gets tagged with a status that describes what the analysis heard. That status is the hinge the whole route decision turns on, so it pays to know what each one means. Answering machine detection (AMD (answering machine detection)) does not return a simple yes or no. It returns a label, and that label decides whether the call goes to an agent, gets a message, or hangs up.

The core AMD statuses

When the Asterisk AMD application finishes listening to the start of a call, it sets a status that VICIdial records. The two you will see most are HUMAN and MACHINE. HUMAN means the analysis decided a live person answered. MACHINE means it heard a long greeting that looks like voicemail or an answering machine.

There is a third common one: NOTSURE. This is the in-between result, where the audio did not clearly match a human or a machine pattern. By default VICIdial treats NOTSURE the same as HUMAN and sends those calls to agents, on the theory that a real person is better off reaching a human than getting cut. You will also see FAX for fax tones and FAS for false answer supervision, where the carrier reported an answer that was not really one.

Each status also carries a cause that explains why the engine landed there, such as a greeting that ran too long or too much initial silence. To see every status and cause that has been logged on your dialers, open the AMD Log Report on the Admin Utilities page. That report is the fastest way to learn how your own leads and lines behave before you start tuning.

From status to route

By default, HUMAN and NOTSURE calls go to agents, while MACHINE calls follow whatever you set for the answering machine action. If AMD send to Action is N, a detected machine hangs up immediately. If it points to a message or a CPD AMD Action, the machine call gets handled instead of dropped.

flowchart TD
  A[Call answered] --> B[AMD analyzes audio]
  B --> C{AMD status}
  C -->|HUMAN| D[Send to agent]
  C -->|NOTSURE| D
  C -->|MACHINE| E[Message or hangup]
  C -->|FAX| F[Fax handling]
  C -->|FAS| G[Treat as not answered]

You are not stuck with the defaults. AMD Agent Route Options lets you override which statuses reach agents using a settings container (Settings container). Each line holds one status-response pair separated by a comma, for example HUMAN,HUMAN to keep humans going to agents, or NOTSURE,TOOLONG to redirect the unsure calls somewhere else. The same container holds NOAUDIODATA-Hangup, FAX-Hangup and FAS-Hangup options for dropping calls that have no real audio.

Why the labels matter for your numbers

Statuses feed straight into your campaign metrics. A machine wrongly tagged HUMAN ties up an agent for a dead call. A live person wrongly tagged MACHINE is an AMD false positive that you just hung up on, which hurts contact rate. Reading the AMD Log Report and adjusting your route options is how you balance those two failure modes for a given Campaign.

Remember that statuses only exist when AMD actually runs, which means an auto-dial method like ratio or adaptive. In manual modes the analysis never fires, so there is nothing to tag. For the wider context, see our AMD and CPD guide, and if you are still deciding whether to turn AMD on at all, read when to use VICIdial AMD.

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