Making an Outbound Call

Overview

You start your outbound application using the name of your Outbound Service. Aculab Cloud makes a call and when it is answered Aculab Cloud starts an instance of your application by calling its First Page.

Walkthrough

Creating your outbound service

Once you've written your outbound application, you need to tell Aculab Cloud how it should be started. You do this by creating a named Outbound Service, setting the Application Server Type to REST API and entering details of your application on the REST API tab.

View/edit your Outbound Services

Starting your outbound service

You can start your outbound service using the gearwheel icon next to your outbound service on the Outbound Services page.

Or you can start your outbound service using the start_service web service:

• call service_start directly, e.g. using a web browser.
• use our Start REST Outbound sample application that's included in each high level language web services wrapper package.
• write a small stand-alone application to call it using one of our high-level language Web Services wrappers.

Once the call is answered

When the call is answered Aculab Cloud then starts your application by requesting your First Page or starts classifying the far end. See Far-end Classification for how things operate when classification is enabled.

Specifying the actions

Each of your pages can respond with a sequence of telephony Actions to be run by Aculab Cloud. This diagram shows the First Page responding with a play action followed by a record action.

Finally

After all your actions have completed the call is hung up and Aculab Cloud makes a request to your Final Page.

If the call is rejected, with busy for example, the Final Page will be called and will receive the reason for rejection, e.g. busy call_cause and 486 call_raw_cause in call_info.

Outbound Call Type

When configuring your Outbound Service you need to specify whether the service is going to be calling a telephone number or a conference, via the Outbound call type dropdown. For any other call destination type (e.g. InboundService or WebRTC please set this to telephone number).

Far-end Classification

You can configure your Outbound Service to classify the far-end of the call (using Live Speaker Detection) as human, answering machine, or fax machine. You can also configure it to hang up automatically if it classifies an answering or fax machine.

In each case, the diagram below shows the early call flow and the points when Aculab Cloud will access your application's First and Final pages. Click the buttons for the scenarios you'd like to see.