Broadcast dialing without live agents

Broadcast dialing, sometimes called robo-dialing, plays a recorded message to a list of numbers with no live agent on the call. Think appointment reminders, payment notices, or political and non-profit announcements. The dialer fans out calls and plays your recording whenever someone or something picks up. Here is how it works and the trade-offs of each playback style.

Where broadcast dialing is allowed

Recorded-message calls are tightly regulated. In the US, calling consumers with a pre-recorded message generally needs prior express written consent, which is why the clean use cases are customer reminders to people who opted in, plus political and non-profit broadcasts. This is practical guidance, not legal advice, so check your TCPA obligations and keep your DNC (do not call) suppression current before you run a broadcast.

The three ways to play your message

How and when the recording starts is the main decision, because it changes both the listener experience and what you can report on.

Play immediately is the simplest. It starts the recording the instant the line connects, needs no dialplan editing, and works with an easy-prompt recording. The downsides: the message begins before the person even says hello, the start gets clipped on voicemail, and the lead gets no meaningful status change. The common workaround is to record your message twice in the same file so the part they miss plays again.

Play after waiting a set number of seconds delays the recording for a fixed time, so it usually starts after a person has said hello. This needs a small dialplan edit and uses a Remote agent to drive the dialing. The trade-off is that any delay means some people hang up first.

Play after waiting for silence listens for a quiet gap before starting, which gives you a rough form of answering-machine detection. It also needs a dialplan edit. The richest option is full answering machine detection (AMD (answering machine detection)), set up entirely from the web interface, which more accurately decides whether it reached a person or a machine and leaves the message accordingly. AMD is never perfect and usually needs some tuning.

How the dialing actually happens

Because no human is logged in, a Remote agent stands in for the live agent. You point its External Extension at the playback path and flip its status to ACTIVE to start the run; setting it to INACTIVE stops the run, which can take a minute to wind down. As calls connect, the lead status moves through values like PU when the message starts and AL once it has fully played. That status trail is how you know whether your list was actually reached.

When broadcast is the right tool

Broadcast shines when the message is one-way and the same for everyone: a reminder, a notice, an announcement. If you need a person to respond before connecting to a human, you want a press-1 survey instead. And if you want some calls handled by agents and some by a recording, you are blending modes and should read the dialing strategies guide for how the dial methods relate. Even with no agents on the call, abandons still count, so the drop-rate guide is worth a read before a large run.

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