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Making an Outbound Call
Overview
You start your outbound application with 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 manually from the Outbound Services page or call the service_start web service on Aculab Cloud by:
- calling service_start directly, e.g. using a web browser
- writing a small stand-alone application to call it using our high-level language Web Service wrapper
- using our Start Outbound utility that's included in each high level language download
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.
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.
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.
