An auto-dialer is an electronic device that can automatically dial telephone numbers to communicate between any two points in the telephone, mobile phone and pager networks. Once the call has been established (through the telephone exchange) the auto-dialer will announce verbal messages or transmit digital data (like SMS messages) to the called party. A telephone number is a string of decimal digits that uniquely indicates the network termination point. ... The telephone or phone (Greek: tele = far away and phone = voice) is a telecommunications device which is used to transmit and receive sound (most commonly voice and speech) across distance. ... A pager that is in use for emergency services A pager is an electronic device used to contact people via a paging network. ... A received SMS being announced on a Nokia phone. ...

A regular PC, desktop or laptop, can be turned into an auto-dialer. In order to connect a PC with a telephone line, a telephony board is needed. Popular telephony boards are those from Dialogic and many traditional auto-dialers are based on Dialogic cards.

Traditionally there are major advantages to using telephony cards over simple modems, including detecting touchtones and transfering calls directly through to the caller.

In recent years, with the advancement of computer software technology many hardware-based telephony capabilities for auto dialing can be implemented in software. Voice modems are much less expensive and some computers have them pre-installed already. Touchtones and call transfer, among many other telephony cards features, are available in voice modem based auto dialing solutions. For autodialers, there are not much advantages in telephony cards over simple voice modems.

Smart autodialer

A Smart Autodialer is an autodialer capable of personalizing messages and collecting touch tone or speech feedbacks. A speech engine is usually included for converting text to speech and recognizing speech over the phone.

To customize or personalize messages, a smart autodialer system uses message template, which contains variables that can be replaced later by actual values. For example, a time variable included in the message template can be replaced by the actual time when a phone call is made.

Semi-automatic dialer

A semi-automatic dialer is a human controlled dialer. All actions, such as dialing, playing audio message, recording, are initiated by human, normally by the press of a key. It is a productivity tool for telemarketing agents.

See also

• telemarketing
• smart autodialer

It has been suggested that Cold Calling be merged into this article or section. ... Smart Autodialer is an Autodialer capable of personalizing messages and collecting touch tone or speech feedbacks. ...

Compare with

• autodialer alarm, which is different from an alarm autodialer.
• predictive dialer, a type of autodialer
• dialer, dialers in general