An agent cannot dial anywhere until it has a number enabled to call from, and every destination is checked before it is dialled.
Enable outbound on a number
A number bought through polite.ai arrives with outbound already enabled. It is on polite.ai's carrier trunk, so it is ready to be presented as caller ID as soon as it is live. Numbers added on your own trunk start disabled.
A number's drawer, opened from the Numbering table, has an Outbound calling section with a button to enable or disable outbound calling. 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 call to the staff member is outbound, whether the transfer is blind or warm with a briefing first. See Teams, transfers & subagents.
- Callbacks and reminders. External systems can trigger an agent to place a call, such as appointment reminders for tomorrow's bookings, promised callbacks, order-ready notifications, or similar workflows. There is deliberately no scheduler in polite.ai: the triggering system decides when, and the agent handles the conversation. The API is in the Aplisay developer docs.
- Browser test calls that transfer. A browser call has no number of its own, so transferring it onwards needs an outbound-enabled number to present as caller ID.
There is no answering-machine detection. If an outbound call might reach voicemail, the agent's instructions should say what to do: "if this sounds like voicemail, leave a short message and end the call" works well.
Try it from the dashboard
Once an agent is deployed to a route, 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. The agent then places the call.
The destination filter
Every outbound destination, including transfer targets, passes through an outbound-call filter before it is dialled, so a caller can never persuade an agent to ring 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 reaches zero.