Voice calling
AI voice calling for outreach places an outbound call to a lead, runs a live speech-to-text, model and speech loop, and writes the transcript back to that lead’s timeline. FounderReply gates every call on consent, an accepted acceptable-use policy, suppression lists and the recipient’s own local business hours.
Outbound only · EU speech loop · Not dialling yet — the band below says why
Status
Voice is code-complete and not yet callable. Every guardrail described further down runs today; no outbound SIP trunk has been registered, so a call fails closed instead of ringing. Here is the exact line between the two.
A Telnyx number plus a registered LiveKit outbound trunk is the whole remaining step. Nothing above it is waiting on code.
Before it dials
A dialler that asks permission after it rings is not a compliance feature. Any one of these can refuse; the calling window is the only one that defers instead, because a good call at the wrong hour is a scheduling problem.
The acceptable-use policy must be accepted, a card must be on file while billing is live, and the workspace must not be paused by the complaint-rate kill switch. This runs before anything about the lead is read.
Enforced in
lib/outreach-gate.ts
Do-not-contact and unsubscribe block outright. Explicit call consent is required unless a workspace turns that default off. The number must not be suppressed, the lead must have business context, and mobile lines are blocked.
Enforced in
lib/eligibility.ts · lib/consent.ts
The country comes from the E.164 number and carries its own window: 09–18 local and that country’s weekend, for the 23 countries mapped. A number no dial code resolves falls back to the workspace policy, 09–20. Closed means the call is scheduled to the next open instant, not dropped.
Enforced in
lib/calling-hours.ts
A call spends telephony and inference money, so a workspace below one voice minute is refused rather than dialled. Minutes are metered when the transcript comes back, keyed on the call id so a retry cannot double-charge.
Enforced in
lib/voice.ts · lib/billing.ts
A scheduled call is not trusted to still be legal when its turn arrives. Eligibility and the window are evaluated again; a suppression added in the meantime cancels it, and a shifted window defers it rather than firing early.
Enforced in
lib/voice.ts runDueScheduledCalls
Where a call runs
The US provider branches were deleted, so a missing environment variable cannot quietly move call audio out of the EU. The app that creates the room and places the SIP dial is a separate service in US-East. Both facts belong on this page.
Calling rules
Three things separate an outbound call a person tolerates from one they report: it arrives at a civil hour, it says what it is, and a single sentence ends it. All three are defaults in the source rather than options in a campaign builder.
The number presented is your own where one is provisioned, and you are the party responsible for the outreach — FounderReply provides the platform.
Calling law is local, and it is yours — the window is a default, not a defence.
The local window — 09–18 in a mapped country, 09–20 otherwise — along with the weekend rule and the mobile-line block are defaults a workspace can change, and changing them is a decision you own. Beyond them:
The gates are tools you use at your discretion, not legal advice and not a guarantee of compliance — the same words the Acceptable Use Policy makes you affirm before your workspace can dial or send anything.
On the call
Most of the difficulty in outbound calling is not the conversation. It is knowing you reached a voicemail greeting, honouring a removal request the second it is spoken, speaking the right language, and never billing for a phone that rang into an empty room.
Answering-machine and IVR detection listens from the moment the line goes live, and stops the agent pitching over a voicemail greeting.
Answered-ness is taken from the telephony layer’s sip.callStatus, not inferred from whether any text appeared — the earlier guess billed calls nobody took.
The agent has an opt-out tool it is instructed to call immediately, apologise once, and hang up. The request is then applied on our side, not just noted.
An in-call opt-out suppresses the number on every channel and marks the lead do-not-contact. The callback retries four times and dead-letters the signed payload rather than losing it.
The likely language is derived from the number’s country and used twice: to select the speech voice, and to tell the model which language to actually write in.
Fifty-six countries map to one of twenty-nine languages. Routing only the voice is what once produced a German voice reading English words, so both halves are set on every call.
When a human actually talked to us, the agent drafts a follow-up referencing what was discussed. That draft goes to the approval queue like every other outbound message.
Same queue as the email channel — one place where a person releases or discards work. Corrected email addresses and dispositions are recorded for a human to apply.
Ring time is never billable and an unanswered call is free. A single call is hard-capped so a hold-music loop cannot run up a bill against a machine.
Duration starts at sip.callStatus=active; metering is keyed on the call id through the processed-events ledger, so a re-delivered webhook cannot charge twice.
The dial request and the transcript callback are both HMAC-signed with separate secrets, and the caller ID presented is the workspace’s own number where one is provisioned.
A mismatched signature fails the call closed rather than degrading to an unauthenticated dial. Caller ID resolves per tenant, falling back to the trunk default.
FAQ
Whether it can call at all today, when it is allowed to ring, which numbers it refuses, where the audio goes, and what a minute costs you.
Until the trunk lands
Every gate on this page already runs on email outreach — the same consent, suppression and eligibility stack, on the channel that is live. Your leads, timeline and approvals carry straight over when the trunk is registered.
Free to start · No credit card required · Human approval on by default