Outpero

Telephony

What is Answering machine detection (AMD)?

Answering machine detection is the technology that determines whether an outbound call has been picked up by a live person or by voicemail, an automated greeting or a network message.

Also called: AMD, voicemail detection

It works by analysing the first seconds of audio: a long, uninterrupted greeting suggests a machine, a short 'hello' suggests a person. In India a frequent edge case is not personal voicemail but network announcements, such as a switched-off or not-reachable message repeated in several languages, which a naive system can mistake for someone speaking. Errors in either direction are costly — hanging up on a real person, or delivering a pitch to a recording.

Why it matters

Detection decides whether talk time is spent on people or on recordings, and whether a number should be retried later. Getting it right also keeps campaign data honest, because machine pickups are separated from genuine no-interest outcomes. Outpero lets a business send voicemail outcomes to its webhook separately from completed calls, so they can feed a retry or follow-up workflow.

What is Answering machine detection (AMD)?

+

Answering machine detection is the technology that determines whether an outbound call has been picked up by a live person or by voicemail, an automated greeting or a network message. It works by analysing the first seconds of audio: a long, uninterrupted greeting suggests a machine, a short 'hello' suggests a person. In India a frequent edge case is not personal voicemail but network announcements, such as a switched-off or not-reachable message repeated in several languages, which a naive system can mistake for someone speaking. Errors in either direction are costly — hanging up on a real person, or delivering a pitch to a recording.

Why does Answering machine detection (AMD) matter?

+

Detection decides whether talk time is spent on people or on recordings, and whether a number should be retried later. Getting it right also keeps campaign data honest, because machine pickups are separated from genuine no-interest outcomes. Outpero lets a business send voicemail outcomes to its webhook separately from completed calls, so they can feed a retry or follow-up workflow.

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