Outbound calling

Outbound is off by default: an agent cannot dial anywhere until a number is enabled to call from, and every destination is checked before it is dialled.

Enable outbound on a number

A number's drawer, opened from the Numbering table, has an Outbound calling section with a button to enable or disable it. An enabled number can be presented as the caller ID on calls agents place. To change many numbers at once, tick their rows and choose Edit from the selection toolbar. SIP registrations have their own Allow outbound calling option.

What agents use it for

• Transfers to a team member. The leg to the staff member — blind, or warm with a briefing first — is an outbound call. See Teams, transfers & subagents.
• Callbacks and reminders. External systems can trigger an agent to place a call — appointment reminders for tomorrow's bookings, promised callbacks, order-ready notifications. There is deliberately no scheduler in polite.ai: the triggering system decides when, the agent handles the conversation. The API lives in the Aplisay developer docs.
• Browser test calls that transfer. A browser call has no number of its own, so transferring one onwards needs an outbound-enabled number to present as caller ID.

Try it from the dashboard

Once an agent is deployed somewhere, its drawer's Deploy tab shows a Place an outbound call section: Call to takes the destination, Call from takes an outbound-enabled number or a registration, and the agent places the call.

The destination filter

Every outbound destination — transfer targets included — passes through an outbound-call filter before it is dialled, so a caller can never talk an agent into ringing an arbitrary number. Designs can go further — a transfer target can come from a lookup in an external system, so the number dialled is one the AI model cannot alter or even see.

What it costs

Outbound calls draw from the same prepaid credit as inbound, billed in 6-second increments, and stop when credit hits zero.