Autodialer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An autodialer is an electronic device that can automatically dial telephone numbers to communicate between any two points in the telephone, mobile phone and pager networks. Once the call has been established (through the telephone exchange) the autodialer will announce verbal messages or transmit digital data (like SMS messages) to the called party.
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[edit] Modem versus telephony boards
A regular PC, desktop or laptop, can be turned into an autodialer. In order to connect a PC with a telephone line, a telephony board is needed. Popular telephony boards are those from Dialogic and many traditional autodialers are based on Dialogic cards.
Traditionally there are major advantages to using telephony cards over simple modems, including detecting touchtones and transferring calls directly through to the caller.
In recent years, with the advancement of computer software technology many hardware-based telephony capabilities for auto dialing can be implemented in software. Voice modems are much less expensive and some computers have them pre-installed already. Touchtones and call transfer, among many other telephony cards features, are available in voice modem based auto dialing solutions. For simple autodialers supporting only a few phone lines per PC, there are not many advantages in telephony cards over simple voice modems.
However with single systems that initiate large volumes of calls simultaneously, telephony cards offload the PC by performing most of the telephony functions (call status determination, playing music on hold, answer machine detection, etc.). Calls can likewise be online cross transfered at the telephony board level.
Autodialers are used in both agent and non-agent backed call applications. Autodialers can connect calls immediately with an agent or can play recorded messages to call recipients and gather information from the recipient using an IVR. This is also refered to as Voice broadcasting. These calls in turn can be transfered to live agents if the calling program is setup to do so.
[edit] Smart autodialer
A Smart Autodialer is an autodialer capable of personalizing messages and collecting touch tone or speech feedbacks. A speech engine is usually included for converting text to speech and recognizing speech over the phone.
To customize or personalize messages, a smart autodialer system uses message template, which contains variables that can be replaced later by actual values. For example, a time variable included in the message template can be replaced by the actual time when a phone call is made.
[edit] Semi-automatic dialer
A semi-automatic dialer is a human controlled dialer. All actions, such as dialing, playing audio message, recording, are initiated by human, normally by the press of a key. It is a productivity tool for telemarketing agents.
[edit] Enterprise grade automatic dialer
A enterprise grade dialer must provide two key features. First, it must be capable of making large number of simultaneous phone calls; and second, it must provide an application programming interface (API) for system integration. Almost all enterprise grade autodialers employ computer networking technology, since voice boards have fixed number of ports and cannot be scaled up. In order to make 2000 simultaneous phone calls, for example, a group of computers have to be linked together to provide the support for that many phone lines.
Some advanced enterprise dialers are distributed dialers, i.e., independent dialers that are linked together through the Internet and controlled by a call dispatching program. With distributed computing, there is virtually no limit on scalability. All distributed dialers, by definition, can be accessed remotely.
[edit] See also
[edit] Compare with
- autodialer alarm, which is different from an alarm autodialer.
- predictive dialer, a type of autodialer
- dialer, dialers in general
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