Glossary
The vocabulary of voice AI
32 terms, written to be read by someone who has just been handed a voice AI project and has a demo on Thursday.
This glossary defines the terms used when buying or building AI phone agents: how calls are recognised and spoken, how outbound campaigns are run and measured, and which rules apply to them. Each entry is a plain definition first, with the detail that matters in practice underneath.
A
- Abandon rateThe abandon rate is the share of answered calls where no agent was available to speak, so the call was dropped or left in silence. US telemarketing rules cap it, generally at three percent of calls answered by a person, measured per campaign over a 30-day period. Dialers often call it the drop rate.
- ACA subsidyAn ACA subsidy is a premium tax credit that lowers the monthly cost of a health plan bought on the US Health Insurance Marketplace. Eligibility and size depend on household size, income relative to the federal poverty level and the cost of plans locally. The rules have changed several times, so the current year's figures always need checking.
- AEPAEP, the Annual Enrollment Period, is the window each fall when US Medicare beneficiaries can join, switch or drop Medicare Advantage and Part D plans. It runs from October 15 to December 7. For Medicare campaigns it concentrates most of the year's volume into a few weeks.
- AMD (answering-machine detection)Answering-machine detection, or AMD, identifies whether a call was answered by a person or by voicemail, so the system can end the call or leave a message rather than connect an agent to a recording. It works by analyzing the first seconds of audio after pickup: silence, greeting length and the beep.
C
- Caller-ID reputationCaller-ID reputation is how carriers and call-blocking apps score a phone number based on its calling pattern and complaints. A poor score means calls are labeled as spam or scam likely, or blocked before they ring, which lowers the connect rate even when the list and the script are good.
- Calling windowA calling window is the range of local hours during which a telemarketing call may lawfully be placed. In the United States the federal window is generally 8am to 9pm in the called party's own time zone, and some states set a shorter window or limit how many calls may be made each day.
- ChargebackA chargeback is the reversal of a commission or payment after a sale, when a policy lapses, is cancelled, or fails a carrier audit. Contracts set how long a sale stays at risk, often several months. Poor verification is one of the most common causes, because customers who did not understand the sale leave quickly.
- CloserA closer is the licensed agent who takes a qualified transfer and completes the sale or enrollment. On insurance campaigns the closer must hold a license in the caller's state; the fronter usually does not. Closers are the most expensive seat on the floor, so every minute they spend on an unqualified caller costs money.
- CMS marketing rulesCMS marketing rules govern how Medicare Advantage and Part D plans, and the agents and marketing organizations selling them, may market to beneficiaries in the United States. They cover required disclaimers, call recording, consent to contact, and what an unlicensed agent may and may not say on a call.
- ConcurrencyConcurrency is the number of calls a system can hold at the same moment. In outbound dialing, one concurrent line is equivalent in capacity to one agent seat. Concurrency limits appear at every layer: the dialer, the SIP trunk, the carrier and, for voice bots, the number of bots running on the campaign.
- Connect rateThe connect rate is the share of dialed numbers answered by a live person, as opposed to voicemail, busy, no answer or a disconnected number. It is driven by list quality, the local time of the call, retry cadence and caller-ID reputation, and it sets how many dials a floor needs for each transfer.
- ConsentConsent is the permission a consumer has given to be contacted, by whom and about what. Prior express written consent is the standard most US telemarketing calls using autodialers or artificial or prerecorded voices are required to meet. It must be provable later, usually with a timestamped record of the form the consumer submitted.
- Contact rateThe contact rate is the share of records on a list that were reached by a live person at least once across all attempts, as opposed to the per-dial connect rate. It tells you how much of a list is actually reachable, and it is the better number for judging whether a list was worth buying.
- ConvosoConvoso is a commercial cloud contact-center platform built for outbound sales teams. It combines predictive dialing, lead management, compliance tooling and reporting in a hosted service, so a center pays a subscription instead of running its own dialer servers. It is common on US insurance and lead-generation campaigns.
D
- Dial ratioThe dial ratio is how many numbers a dialer calls at once per available agent. A ratio of 3 means three lines are dialed for each free agent. A higher ratio raises agent utilization and reduces waiting, and it also raises the abandon rate when more people answer than there are agents to take them.
- DIDA DID, short for direct inward dialing number, is an individual telephone number routed to a specific destination such as a queue, an agent or an IVR. Outbound campaigns use pools of DIDs as the caller IDs consumers see, and route callbacks to those numbers back to the right campaign.
- DispositionA disposition is the outcome code written against a call: transferred, not interested, answering machine, do not call, disqualified, callback. Dispositions are what every downstream report is built from, and they decide what the dialer does with the number next, whether it is called again, recycled later or suppressed for good.
- DNC (do not call)DNC stands for Do Not Call. A do-not-call list records numbers that must not be dialed for telemarketing. It includes the US National Do Not Call Registry, state registries, and the internal list of people who have asked a specific business to stop calling. Calling a number on any of them can create legal liability.
M
- Medicare Part A and Part BPart A covers hospital insurance and Part B covers medical insurance under US Medicare, together called Original Medicare. Enrollment in both is required to join a Medicare Advantage plan, so on most Medicare campaigns it is the main qualifying question a fronter asks before transferring a caller to a licensed agent.
- MVA leadAn MVA lead, short for motor vehicle accident lead, is a consumer who has been in a road traffic collision and may have a personal injury claim. Law firms buy them as live transfers or signed cases. Intake criteria vary widely between firms, and usually cover fault, injury, treatment, timing and whether the person already has a lawyer.
S
- SIP trunkA SIP trunk is the connection that carries voice calls between a call center's systems, such as a ViciDial server, and the public telephone network over the internet. The carrier providing the trunk sets how many calls can run at once, how fast new calls can start, and which caller IDs may be used.
- STIR/SHAKENSTIR/SHAKEN is the US framework that lets carriers cryptographically attest that a caller ID has not been spoofed. The originating carrier signs each call with an attestation level of A, B or C. Calls with weak or no attestation are more likely to be labeled as spam or blocked.
T
- TCPAThe Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, is the US federal law governing telemarketing calls and texts. It covers consent, calling hours, do-not-call obligations and the use of autodialers and artificial or prerecorded voices. It is enforced by the FCC and through private lawsuits, with damages counted per call.
- TransferA warm transfer hands a qualified caller who is still on the line to a live agent, with the caller introduced first so the agent knows who is calling and why. The first agent stays on until the second answers. A cold or blind transfer sends the call across with no introduction.
V
- VerifierA verifier confirms a sale or enrollment after the closer has taken it, reading each required statement back to the customer on a recorded line and capturing an explicit answer to every one. The verification recording is the proof a carrier or client relies on if the sale is ever questioned.
- ViciDialViciDial is an open-source contact-center and predictive dialer platform built on the Asterisk phone system. Outbound call centers use it widely because it is free to license, can be self-hosted, and handles campaigns, lists, predictive dialing, transfers, recording and reporting in one system. Most offshore floors running US campaigns know it well.