Outbound dialer

The dialer has no endpoints of its own. It watches the batches you create through the Outbound batches API and works through their leads, and everything it does is visible as lead statuses and call attempts on those batches. This page explains what happens between publish and COMPLETED.

Two processes

The dial cycle runs every few seconds. Each pass claims pending leads from every active batch, up to the batch’s fetch_limit, marks them DIALING, spreads them across the available Asterisk servers and asks each server to originate the calls. Originates are sent concurrently, with a small pacing gap between them, so a batch of a few hundred leads gets going within a minute. Exactly one dial cycle runs at a time across the whole platform.

The AMI listener is a single always-on process holding a connection to every Asterisk server. When a call is answered, goes unanswered, hits a busy line or fails, Asterisk reports it and the listener writes the outcome to the lead. Without the listener, dialed leads would stay DIALING forever and no batch would ever complete.

When a lead is dialed, the voice worker that answers the call loads the batch’s AI agent and the lead’s dynamic_variables, so the agent knows who it is talking to.

Lead lifecycle

PENDING ──▶ DIALING ──▶ ANSWERED
                   ├──▶ NO_ANSWER
                   ├──▶ BUSY
                   └──▶ FAILED

ANSWERED leads also carry an end_reason: USER when the remote party hung up, SYSTEM when the agent or our side ended the call. The current dialer makes one attempt per lead: a lead that ends in NO_ANSWER, BUSY or FAILED stays there.

Each attempt is recorded separately as a call attempt with the server it was sent to, the trunk and extension used, the dialed number, the caller id, timings and one of these statuses: originate_requested, originate_sent, originate_failed, IN_CALL, ANSWERED, NOT_ANSWERED, REJECTED_SRV, REJECTED_CLIENT, BUSY.

Batch lifecycle

A batch is only dialed while it is ACTIVE. Stopping a batch (POST …/stop) sets it to STOPPED: the dial cycle skips it from the next pass, but leads already DIALING finish and get their outcome. Adding leads to a stopped or completed batch reopens it.

Completion is counted, not polled: every terminal outcome increments the batch’s completed_leads, and when it reaches total_leads the batch flips to COMPLETED.

Operator settings

These are environment settings on the platform, not per-batch fields. Defaults are shown.