The voiceREACH voice broadcasting service has some very sophisticated technology built into it which enables it to determine if it is talking with a live person, or an answering machine. This can be really useful if you want to send different messages to live people and answering machines. Understanding how this technology works will help you get better results on your future voice broadcast campaigns.
Positive Answering Machine Detection - PAMD
PAMD is a very useful feature of voiceREACH because it enables you to send different messages to live answers and answering machines. I won't go into why and how you do that in this article, but am rather going to focus on how positive answering machine detection works.
PAMD is really quite simple in how it works. When a voice broadcast call is delivered to a telephone and the system gets an "off-hook" (ie. the call is answered either by a person picking up the handset, or by answering machine), the system listens to the noises it hears to determine if the off-hook is indeed a live person, or an answering machine.
Generally, a live person will answer the phone by saying a quick greeting and then waiting for the caller to respond - eg. "Hello, this is John...."; whilst an answering machine will normally play a much longer greeting, followed by a tone - eg. "Hello, you've reached John, I'm sorry I can't take your call right now, please leave me a message... beeeep".
As you can see, there is a significant difference in the greetings. Just as we can easily determine the difference, so can voiceREACH using Positive Answering Machine Detection.
Approx 90% Accuracy...
Unfortunately, PAMD is not 100% accurate. This is basically because the system can't distinguish between a person's voice, and other background noise. So, in the case where a live person answered the phone in a noisy coffee shop, the PAMD may listen to the greeting and continue listening after the greeting has finished because it is receiving noise from other people nearby. In this case the system is likely to assume the recipient is an answering machine.
Therefore, background noise can play a factor in the success of positive answering machine detection and the system can sometimes get it wrong. voiceREACH however does have one of the highest PAMD success rates in the world at approximately 90%.
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