AMD is a deployment-wide setting managed by your administrator in system settings, not a per-campaign switch in the campaign wizard. There is no AMD toggle on a campaign. What you control as an operator is how you read its results — see Reading the numbers.
What AMD does
When a contact’s phone is answered, something has to decide very quickly whether the line was picked up by a human (“Hello?”) or by an answering machine (“You’ve reached… please leave a message after the tone”). AMD makes that decision in the first couple of seconds, before the bot says anything.- If a human is detected, the call is attached to the bot and the conversation begins as normal.
- If a machine is detected, the call is closed without ever attaching the bot, so no conversation minutes are spent on a voicemail greeting.
- If the result is uncertain, the call follows the configured fallback — usually attaching to the bot anyway, so a real person is never dropped by mistake.
Where it sits in the call flow
A normal answered call moves from ringing, to attaching the bot, to an in-progress conversation. With AMD enabled, a short screening step is inserted between answer and attach.Settings
AMD is tuned once per deployment in system settings. You will not see these controls in the campaign wizard; they are listed here so you understand what each one affects when you ask your administrator to adjust the screen.| Setting | Typical default | What it controls |
|---|---|---|
| Enabled | Off | Whether AMD runs at all for the deployment. When off, every answered call attaches the bot directly. |
| Listen window | ~2 seconds | How long the screen listens before it must decide. Kept short so callers feel little delay. |
| Initial-silence threshold | ~2 seconds | Silence at the start of the call that, on its own, suggests a machine rather than a person saying “hello”. |
| Greeting-length threshold | ~2 seconds | A spoken greeting longer than this leans towards “machine” (voicemail greetings tend to run long). |
| Maximum greeting words | ~4 words | A greeting with more words than this leans towards “machine”. |
| Beep detection | On | Listens for the voicemail beep tone. A beep is a strong machine signal. |
| Action on machine | Close the call | What to do when a machine is detected — close the call (the usual choice) or attach the bot anyway. |
| Action on uncertain | Attach the bot | What to do when the screen cannot decide — attach the bot (the safe default) or close the call. |
Outcomes
Every screened call ends in one of three decisions. Each decision maps to what happens to the call.| Decision | What it usually means | What happens to the call |
|---|---|---|
| Human | A short greeting followed by a pause — a person saying “hello?”. | Attached to the bot; the conversation proceeds and is counted as connected. |
| Machine | A voicemail beep, a long greeting, too many greeting words, or a long opening silence. | Closed without attaching the bot. Counted as a machine answer on the campaign. |
| Uncertain | The listen window ran out before a confident decision. | Follows the action on uncertain setting — normally attached to the bot. |
A call closed as a machine is a final outcome for that attempt — the contact is not treated as having had a real conversation. Whether the dialler tries the same contact again depends on your campaign’s retry rules, not on AMD. See Pacing and retries.
Reading the numbers
You do not switch AMD on or off as an operator, but you do see its effect on the campaign detail and monitor page. The relevant figures are:AMD Machine
A count in the campaign stats grid of how many answered calls were screened out as machines. It only appears once at least one machine has been detected.
Answer Rate
The share of dialled calls that were answered. Machine answers are still “answered” at the carrier level, so AMD shows up as the gap between Answer Rate and how many calls actually became conversations.
- A very high machine rate on a list you expected to be mostly mobiles may mean the screen is too aggressive and is closing real people. Ask your administrator to review the action and threshold settings.
- A near-zero machine rate on a list with many landlines or known voicemail numbers may mean the screen is too lax and machines are slipping through to the bot.
- A steady, moderate rate that tracks the quality of the contact list is the healthy case.
The machine count is a campaign total. To see which individual attempts were screened out, open the call list on the monitor page and review each contact’s attempt trail. The Dispositions reference explains how machine answers and other automatic outcomes are labelled.
How AMD interacts with other features
Retries
Retries
AMD does not retry on its own. A machine answer is a finished attempt; whether that contact is dialled again is decided by your campaign’s Max Attempts and Retry on System Dispositions settings. If you want machine answers to be retried later, configure that in Pacing and retries.
Callbacks
Callbacks
Scheduled callbacks are screened by AMD just like first attempts. If a callback reaches a machine, it is closed as a machine answer and its callback status updates accordingly. See Callbacks.
The bot conversation
The bot conversation
Because a machine-detected call is never attached, the bot never speaks to it — there is no transcript, no post-call analysis, and no LLM or TTS cost for that call. Only calls that pass the screen become bot conversations.
Connect-based redial rules
Connect-based redial rules
AMD runs before any conversation, so the “redial after a short connect” and “stop redials after a meaningful connect” rules in the wizard only ever apply to calls that actually reached the bot. A machine answer is not a “connect” for those rules.
Safety net
Screening is meant to last only about two seconds. If the dialler stops unexpectedly while a call is mid-screen, a background safeguard closes any call left in the screening state after a short grace period and tears down the underlying call leg first. This means an answered call is never left hanging and quietly burning minutes if something goes wrong during the screen.Operator notes
- AMD is a deployment-level setting. If you need it turned on, off, or retuned, raise it with your administrator — it cannot be changed from the campaign wizard.
- A short pause before the bot greets a caller is normal when AMD is enabled; it is the screen listening.
- Watch the AMD Machine count alongside Answer Rate to judge both list quality and whether the screen is tuned correctly.
- If operators report the bot talking over voicemail greetings, or genuine customers being dropped at answer, capture a few example calls and share them with your administrator so the thresholds can be reviewed.
What’s next
- Monitor campaigns — where the AMD Machine count and answer metrics appear
- Pacing and retries — how machine answers feed into retry decisions
- Dispositions reference — how automatic call outcomes, including machine answers, are labelled