Robocall

A robocall is an automated phone call. The machine does the dialing, and very often a recorded voice does the talking instead of a live person. The word covers a wide range, from a doctor's office appointment reminder to a fraudulent scam, so what makes a robocall lawful is consent and disclosure, not the technology itself. The same dialer can place a perfectly legal informational call and an illegal marketing blast; the difference is who agreed to be called and what you tell them.

In VICIdial there are a few ways to make calls that count as robocalls. broadcast dialing blasts a recorded message to a whole list with no agent involved at all. A press 1 campaign plays a recording and routes anyone who presses a key to a live closer, which is still a recorded call up to that point. Even ordinary predictive dialing can produce robocall-style abandoned calls when no agent is free in time and the system plays a fallback message. The general term for letting the machine carry the calling load is robo dialing.

The legal weight is real and specific. Sending a pre-recorded marketing message to a mobile phone in the US generally needs prior express written consent, a higher bar than a casual opt-in. The tcpa is the main law that governs this, and penalties stack up per call, so a single careless broadcast to a large list can turn into a very large number very quickly. Informational and emergency calls sit under different, looser rules, but it is risky to assume your campaign qualifies without checking.

This is a practical definition, not legal advice. The safe habit is simple to state and worth the discipline: know exactly which of your campaigns produce recorded or machine calls, confirm you have permission to reach each number that way, and keep a dated record of where that permission came from. Treat every list as if a regulator might one day ask, in detail, how you got consent for each number on it.