dialing
Live answer
When a real person picks up the phone rather than an answering machine, fax, or busy signal, marking the moment an agent should be connected.
A live answer is the moment a real human picks up an outbound call, as opposed to an answering machine, a fax tone, or a busy signal. It is the event your whole dialing operation is built around, because it is the instant an agent should be talking to someone instead of waiting for the next connection. Everything the dialer does upstream is in service of producing as many genuine live answers as it safely can.
Detecting a live answer is harder than it sounds. The phone network signals when a call is picked up through Answer supervision, but that only tells you the line connected, not whether a person or a machine is on the other end. To bridge that gap VICIdial leans on AMD (answering machine detection), short for answering machine detection, which listens during the first second or two and guesses whether it heard a human greeting or a recorded one based on the length and rhythm of the speech.
Why the distinction matters
In Predictive dialing, the system only wants to hand an agent a real conversation, never a recording. Calls that turn out to be machines can be sent to Voicemail drop to leave a prepared message, or simply hung up, while confirmed live answers go straight to a waiting agent. Getting this split right is what keeps agents busy with people instead of burning their time listening to outgoing voicemail greetings.
Live answers also drive your headline metrics. Your Answer rate counts how many dials reached any pickup at all, while your Contact rate focuses more narrowly on reaching the right live person you intended to speak with. The tradeoff is delicate: when detection is too eager it clips real people in their first words and makes them hang up, and when it is too cautious it sends humans down the machine path. Tuning that balance is one of the quieter but more important jobs in running a dialer well.
Related terms
AMD (answering machine detection)
Answering machine detection is the dialer feature that listens after pickup to guess whether a human or a machine answered, then routes the call accordingly.
Answer rate
Answer rate is the share of dialed calls that connect to anything at all — a person, a machine, or a fax — before any human filtering.
Answer supervision
Answer supervision is the carrier signal that tells your system the exact moment a call is truly answered, which everything else times its actions from.
Contact rate
Contact rate is the share of dialed numbers that reach a live person, telling you how much of your list and dialing is actually producing conversations.
Predictive dialing
A dialing mode where VICIdial places more calls than there are free agents, predicting how many will connect, to keep agents busy.
Voicemail drop
Voicemail drop plays a pre-recorded message into a contact's voicemail box, freeing the agent to move on to the next live call.