Outbound is off by default: an agent can't dial anywhere until you've enabled a number to call from, and every destination is checked before it's dialled.
Enable outbound on a number
Open a number's drawer from the Numbering table — the Outbound calling section shows whether it's Enabled or Disabled, with a button to flip it. An enabled number can be presented as the caller ID on calls your agents place.
To change many numbers at once, tick their rows in the table and choose Edit from the selection toolbar — one checkbox sets the outbound flag across the whole selection. SIP registrations have their own Allow outbound calling option and can carry outbound calls the same way.
What agents use it for
- Transfers to your team. When an agent puts a caller through to a human — blind, or warm with a briefing first — the leg to your staff member is an outbound call. See Teams, transfers & subagents.
- Callbacks and reminders. Your own systems can trigger an agent to place a call — appointment reminders for tomorrow's bookings, "we'll call you back" promises actually kept, order-ready notifications. There's deliberately no scheduler in polite.ai: your system decides when, the agent handles the conversation. The API for this lives in the Aplisay developer docs.
- Browser test calls that transfer. A browser call has no number of its own, so transferring one onwards needs an outbound-enabled number to present as caller ID.
There's no answering-machine detection. If an outbound call might reach voicemail, say so in the agent's instructions — "if this sounds like voicemail, leave a short message and hang up" works well.
Try it from the dashboard
Once the agent is deployed somewhere, its drawer's Deploy tab shows a Place an outbound call section: enter Call to (the destination) and Call from — which must be one of your outbound-enabled numbers or a registration — and the agent rings you. It's the quickest way to hear an outbound design before wiring it into anything.
The destination filter
Every outbound destination — transfer targets included — passes through an outbound-call filter before it's dialled. It exists so that a caller can never talk an agent into ringing an arbitrary number: the agent can only reach destinations the filter allows. Designs can go further — a transfer target can come from a lookup in your own systems, so the number dialled is one the AI model can't alter or even see.
What it costs
Outbound calls draw from the same prepaid credit as inbound, billed in 6-second increments. As with everything on polite.ai, calls stop when credit hits zero — you can never owe us money.