JKASMS

Voice calls

A voice campaign rings a list of phones and plays a recording. It is the same audience you text — the same contacts, the same groups — reached by a call instead of a message.

Send from the dashboard or from the API — POST /api/v1/voice/send. For verification codes read down the phone, see Voice OTP.

Voice credit is its own balance

You hold three balances, and they are never interchangeable:

  • Wallet money, in cedis. Buys bundles. Never spent on sending or calling.
  • SMS credits, counted in segments. One credit sends one segment.
  • Voice credits, counted in seconds of call time.

SMS credits cannot pay for a call and call time cannot send a text. If you have thousands of SMS credits and no voice credit, a voice campaign is refused — buy a voice bundle from your wallet. Voice bundles are sold in hours; an hour is 3,600 seconds.

What a call costs

The recording's length, once per person reached:

seconds charged = recording length × recipients

A 30-second recording to 100 people costs 3,000 seconds — 50 minutes of your call time. The length is measured from the audio file itself when you upload it, not declared by you, so the figure on the confirmation screen is the figure you are charged.

Length is charged in full whether or not the recipient listens to the end. A 60-second recording answered and hung up after two seconds still costs 60. Keep recordings short — it is the single biggest lever on what a campaign costs.

Retries are charged per attempt

By default, unanswered calls are re-dialled. Each attempt is a separate call and costs the recording's length again. Turn retries off in the composer when one attempt is enough — for a reminder that will also go out by SMS, it usually is.

What happens to a call that never dials

Call time is reserved when you send and charged when the carrier accepts the call. Cancel a campaign before it dials and the unused seconds come straight back. You can see the difference on the call history page: a campaign shows what was billed against what was held.

Recordings

Upload an audio file once and use it across as many campaigns as you like. Limits:

  • Up to 10 MB per file.
  • Up to 5 minutes long.
  • MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, WMA, M4A or OGG.

The five-minute ceiling is a cost guard as much as a technical one: at 10,000 recipients, a five-minute recording is three million seconds of call time. Better a clear refusal than that discovered on your balance.

A recording cannot be deleted while a campaign still references it — deleting it would leave that campaign's history unable to say what was played.

Text to speech

You can also type your message and have it spoken, instead of recording audio yourself. Numbers are read digit by digit, so an amount or a reference is not mangled into “four hundred eighty-two thousand”.

Call outcomes

Carriers report less about a call than they do about a message. What you see on call history:

  • Answered — they picked up and heard the recording.
  • No answer — it rang out.
  • Busy — declined, engaged, unreachable or switched off. Carriers do not distinguish these, so neither do we rather than guess.
  • Failed — the call could not be placed at all.

Outcomes settle a few minutes after the call. A call still shown as ringing has been placed and is waiting on the carrier's report.

Before you call people

A call interrupts someone, possibly at night, from a number they do not recognise. Check the hour on anything you schedule, and hold voice for messages that earn the interruption — an outage, a closure, a deadline. Opt-outs apply to calls exactly as they do to texts.

Which carrier places the call

Whichever one we have configured as the voice route. Carriers and speech engines are selected from configuration, not hard-coded, so the route can change without anything changing for you — the cost you are quoted is in seconds of your own call time either way.