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An autodialer, autodialler, or automatic calling unit is an electronic device that can automatically dial telephone numbers to communicate between any two points in the telephone, mobile phone and pager networks. Once the call has been established (through the telephone exchange) the autodialer will announce verbal messages or transmit digital data (like SMS messages) to the called party.

A key technology for autodialers is the ability to detect live human pickup and answering machine. Since there is no indication/hardware signal when a call is answered by an answering machine or voicemail system, autodialer systems have to analyze incoming audio in order to make a prediction. Today, there is no algorithm that can achieve 100% accuracy.

A regular PC, desktop or laptop, can be turned into an autodialer. In order to connect a PC with a telephone line, a telephony board or modem is necessary. There are software programs which will allow you to setup an autodialer like function over a physical telephone line using a modem or telephony board. It is possible to run cheap or free autodialers without a modem or telephone line using the internet and VOIP.

Traditionally there are major advantages to using telephony cards over simple modems, including detecting touch tones and transferring calls directly through to the caller.

In recent years, with the advancement of computer software technology many hardware-based telephony capabilities for auto dialing can be implemented in software. Voice modems are much less expensive and some computers have them pre-installed already. Touch tones, call transfer, call progress detection, answering machine and voice mail detection, among many other telephony cards features, are available in voice modem based auto dialing solutions. For simple autodialer supporting only a few phone lines per PC, there are not many advantages in telephony cards over simple voice modems.

However with single systems that initiate large volumes of calls simultaneously, telephony cards offload the PC by performing most of the telephony functions (call status determination, playing music on hold, answer machine detection, etc.). Calls can likewise be online cross transferred at the telephony board level.

A Smart Autodialer is an autodialer capable of personalizing messages and collecting touch tone or speech feedbacks. A speech engine is usually included for converting text to speech and recognizing speech over the phone.

To customize or personalize messages, a smart autodialer system uses message template, which contains variables that can be replaced later by actual values. For example, a time variable included in the message template can be replaced by the actual time when a phone call is made.

A semi-automatic dialer is a human controlled dialer. All actions, such as dialing, playing audio message, recording, are initiated by human, normally by the press of a key. It is a productivity tool for telemarketing agents.

An enterprise grade dialer must provide two key features. First, it must be capable of making large number of simultaneous phone calls; and second, it must provide an application programming interface (API) for system integration. Almost all enterprise grade autodialers employ computer networking technology, since voice boards have fixed number of ports and cannot be scaled up. In order to make 2000 simultaneous phone calls, for example, a group of computers have to be linked together to provide the support for that many phone lines.

Some advanced enterprise dialers are distributed dialers, i.e., independent dialers that are linked together through the Internet and controlled by a call dispatching program. With distributed computing, there is virtually no limit on scalability. All distributed dialers, by definition, can be accessed remotely.

• Spam (electronic)
• Telemarketing

• autodialer alarm, which is different from an alarm autodialer.
• predictive dialer, a type of autodialer
• dialer, dialers in general