Improve voicemail detection | Voters

Improve voicemail detection

Pranjal

Improve voicemail beep detection on Vapi for assistant to reply smartly. Sometimes assistant hears a beep in the background noise of the prospect and decides to redirect the call to voicemail.

April 14, 2024

Kai

Reason this feature is interesting: voicemails convert. Voicemail detection is crappy. At scale, I'd guess more than 60% of calls go to voicemail across domains (customer support, hiring, sales, etc)

Kai

Let's get specific. What we want is the ability to detect sounds based on prompting. From experience hearing voice messages being left, it's anything from "a loud beep at the beginning" to "a prompt and a beep" to "silence then a beep".

To do voicemail detection well, then, requires 2 features:

Detect sounds based on natural language. "If you hear a beep..."
Timing delays. "If you hear a beep after 5 seconds..."

(2) sounds challenging, and I'm not sure is feasible given the current pipeline. But having a "max TTL before voicemail" might be an interesting feature.

Kai

At the moment, voicemail is also not well implemented. In the VAPI dashboard call recording I hear the entire voicemail, but in the actual voicemail I play on my phone, I hear only half my message

Alex Kh.

Also I don't think vAPI should rely on Twilio Voicemail recognition at all. Twilio often doesn't recognize even the most obvious 'You reached the voicemail' messages, and on the other hand they dropped dozens of calls thinking they are a voicemail. We asked them how they do or don't recognize cases which even simplest GPT3.5 recognizes 100% of the time, but Twilio supports aren't devs and they reply with 'well it's just the way it is'.