Outbound Calling

Quickstart sending outbound calls with Vapi.

An outbound call is a phone call that is dialed and goes “out” from a phone number, & in our case, our AI assistant will be doing the dialing.

There are 3 steps we will cover to send our first outbound phone call:

  1. Create an Assistant: we will create an assistant & instruct it on how to conduct itself during the call
  2. Get a Phone Number: we can either import existing numbers we own, or purchase one through Vapi
  3. Call Your Number: we will set our assistant as the dialer, set the destination phone number, then make the call

We can then send the outbound call, hopefully someone picks up!

It is a violation of FCC law to dial phone numbers without consent in an automated manner. See Telemarketing Sales Rule to learn more.

Vapi’s Pizzeria

We will be implementing a simple order-taking assistant for a pizza shop called “Vapi’s Pizzeria”.

Vapi’s has 3 types of menu items: pizza, sides, & drinks. Customers will be ordering 1 of each.

Outbound Scenario: We will imagine we are calling back a customer who originally called in to place an order. Our assistant is calling back to complete the ordering process with the customer.

Customers can order 3 items: 1 pizza, 1 side, & 1 drink. The assistant will call the customer (who got disconnected) & finish the ordering process.

Assistant Setup

First we’re going to set up our assistant in the dashboard. Once our assistant’s transcriber, model, & voice are set up, we can have it call the customer to finish the order.

You can visit your dashboard by going to dashboard.vapi.ai

Get a Phone Number

Now that we’ve configured how our assistant will behave, we want to figure out how to dial calls with it. We will need a phone number that we can call from.

There are 2 ways we can get a phone number into our Vapi account:

  1. Purchase a Number Through Vapi: we can directly purchase phone numbers through Vapi.

    • Vapi will provision the phone number for us via Twilio
    • This can be done in the dashboard, or via the API (we will use the dashboard)

  2. Import from Twilio or Vonage: if we already have a phone number with an external telephony provider (like Twilio or Vonage), we can import them into our Vapi account.

Call Your Number

We can now make outbound calls to phone numbers, setting our assistant as the one doing the dialing.

In the phone numbers section of the dashboard, go to your phone number detail page. We will:

  1. fill out our own phone number as the number to dial
  2. set our assistant as the one doing the calling
When we hit the call button, our assistant will make the outbound call to the phone number.

You can now hit the call button to make the outbound call. Your assistant will dial the phone number & manage the order recovery process.

Your assistant won’t yet be able to hang-up the phone at the end of the call. We will learn more about configuring call end behaviour in later guides.