This guide explains how your AI Employee automatically detects voicemail systems, call screening gatekeepers, and busy announcements during outbound calls, and how to configure the behavior for each scenario.
How detection works
During an outbound call, the AI Employee continuously analyzes the conversation to classify who or what it is speaking to. It distinguishes between four scenarios:
Detection type | Description | AI Employee behavior |
Human | A real person answered the call. | Continues the conversation normally. |
Voicemail | An automated voicemail system (e.g., "leave a message after the beep"). | Follows your voicemail behavior instruction, then hangs up. |
Call screening | A gatekeeper system asking for the caller's name or reason (e.g., "please state your name and reason for calling"). | States its name and call reason, then waits for a human to connect. |
Busy announcement | A hold message (e.g., "the party you are calling is on another call, please hold"). | Waits for the human to become available, then re-greets and continues. |
Detection runs automatically on every outbound call. No configuration is needed to enable it.
🗒️ NOTE
The AI Employee uses a two-pass confirmation system to minimize false positives. Both voicemail and human detections are verified twice before the AI Employee changes its behavior.
Configure voicemail behavior
You can define specific instructions for the AI Employee to follow when it detects a voicemail during an outbound call.
Navigate to the Builder > Attributes or the Portal > Settings > Agent tab.
Locate the attribute
project_representative_agent_voicemail_detection_behavior_instruction.Enter your instruction text in the value field.
Save the changes.
Example instruction
You can instruct the agent to leave a specific message. For example:
"Leave a brief message including the business name and phone number and say goodbye."
❗❗ IMPORTANT
If you want the agent to hang up immediately after leaving a voicemail, you must instruct the agent to say "goodbye" in your instruction. Otherwise, the agent may stay on the line for approximately 30 seconds due to an extra fallback timer.
Call screening behavior
When the AI Employee detects a call screening system, it automatically:
States the reason for the call so the screening system can identify the caller.
Waits for a human to be connected.
When a human answers, re-greets and continues the conversation from the beginning.
If the screening system asks the AI Employee to hold or wait, it responds with "Okay, I will wait" and remains on the line. If the screening system asks the AI Employee to leave a message, it follows the voicemail behavior instruction instead.
No configuration is needed for call screening behavior. The AI Employee handles it automatically.
Busy announcement behavior
When the AI Employee detects a busy or hold announcement, it automatically waits for the human to become available. Once the human picks up and greets the AI Employee, it re-greets and states the call reason again.
No configuration is needed for busy announcement behavior.
Adjust timeout settings
If your voicemail instruction requires the agent to speak for a long duration, you may need to adjust the call timeout settings to prevent the call from cutting off prematurely.
Signs that the timeout needs adjustment include the agent not finalizing its speech or hanging up while only halfway through a sentence.
To adjust the timeout:
Locate the attribute
project_attributes_setting_voice_stop_call_timeout.Increase the value to accommodate the length of the expected voicemail message.
Enable inbound spam detection
For inbound calls, the AI Employee can detect spam callers — callers who repeatedly ignore the topic, give nonsensical responses, or say the same phrases over and over. This check is disabled by default.
To enable spam detection on inbound calls:
Navigate to the Attributes page.
Locate
project_attributes_setting_check_spam_or_voicemail.Set the value to
True.
When spam is detected on an inbound call, the AI Employee verbally identifies the caller as spam and ends the call.
🗒️ NOTE
Outbound voicemail and call screening detection runs automatically regardless of this setting. The project_attributes_setting_check_spam_or_voicemail attribute only controls inbound spam detection.