Send an AI phone call with a custom objective and actions. This endpoint can be used to create dynamic phone calls where the AI agent can follow instructions, use tools, and follow a conversation pathway.
Specify a phone number to call from that you own or have uploaded from your Twilio account. Country code is required, spaces or parentheses must be excluded.By default, calls are initiated from a separate pool of numbers owned by Bland. If you are using your own twilio numbers, you must specify a matching encrypted_key in the create call request headers.
This is the pathway ID for the pathway you have created on our dev portal. You
can access the ID of your pathways by clicking the ‘Copy ID’ button of your
pathway hereNote: Certain parameters do not apply when using pathways.Example Simple Request body:
Note: Do not specify if using a pathway.Provide instructions, relevant information, and examples of the ideal conversation flow.This is your prompt where you are telling the agent what to do.Recommendations:
Include context and a background/persona for the agent like "You are {name}, a customer service agent at {company} calling {name} about {reason}.
Phrase instructions like you are speaking to the agent before the call.
Any time you tell the agent not to do something, provide an example of what they should do instead.
Keep the prompt under 2,000 characters where possible.
The voice of the AI agent to use. Accepts any form of voice ID, including custom voice clones and voice presets.Default voices can be referenced directly by their name instead of an id.Usage example: voice: “maya”Bland Curated voices:
The ID of the persona to use for the call.Personas act as pre-configured templates that automatically apply a configuration when you pass a persona_id to an outbound call. Think of them as “call presets” that you can reuse across multiple calls.When using a persona_id, any parameters specified in your request body will override the corresponding parameters from the persona’s configuration.You can access your persona IDs by clicking the “Personas” button at the bottom of the Send Call page, and then “Use and Manage”.
Select an audio track that you’d like to play in the background during the call. The audio will play continuously when the agent isn’t speaking, and is incorporated into it’s speech as well.Use this to provide a more natural, seamless, engaging experience for the conversation. We’ve found this creates a significantly smoother call experience by minimizing the stark differences between total silence and the agent’s speech.Options:
null - Default, will play audible but quiet phone static.
office - Office-style soundscape. Includes faint typing, chatter, clicks, and other office sounds.
cafe - Cafe-like soundscape. Includes faint talking, clinking, and other cafe sounds.
(Optional) Custom instructions for how the call summary should be generated after the call completes. Use this to provide specific guidance or context for the AI when writing the post-call summary. Maximum length: 2000 characters.Example:
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{ "summary_prompt": "Summarize the call in 2-3 sentences, focusing on the customer's main concern and any next steps discussed."}
By default, the agent starts talking as soon as the call connects.When wait_for_greeting is set to true, the agent will wait for the call recipient to speak first before responding.
Adjusts how patient the AI is when waiting for the user to finish speaking.Lower values mean the AI will respond more quickly, while higher values mean the AI will wait longer before responding.Recommended range: 50-200
• 50: Extremely quick, back and forth conversation
• 100: Balanced to respond at a natural pace
• 200: Very patient, allows for long pauses and interruptions. Ideal for collecting detailed information.Try to start with 100 and make small adjustments in increments of ~10 as needed for your use case.
A value between 0 and 1 that controls the randomness of the LLM. 0 will cause more deterministic outputs while 1 will cause more random.Example Values: “0.9”, “0.3”, “0.5”
These words will be boosted in the transcription engine - recommended for proper nouns or words that are frequently mis-transcribed.For example, if the word Blandy is frequently transcribed as a homonym like “Reese” you could do this:
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{ "keywords": ["Blandy"] }
For stronger keyword boosts, you can place a colon then a boost factor after the word. The default boost factor is 2.
The pronunciation guide is an array of objects that guides the agent on how to say specific words. Use this to improve clarity for acronyms, names, brand terms, or jargon.
word
— the word you want to guide the LLM on how to pronounce
pronunciation
— how the AI should pronounce the word, using syllables or space-separated characters. For example, "A P I" ensures each letter is spoken clearly rather than read as a word.
case_sensitive
— whether or not to consider case. Particularly useful with names. EG: ‘Max’ the name versus ‘max’ the word. Defaults to false. Not required.
spaced
— whether to match whole words only. When true, “high” will match “high” but not “hightop”. When false, it will match any word that contains “high”. Defaults to true. Not required.
A phone number that the agent can transfer to under specific conditions - such as being asked to speak to a human or supervisor. This option will be ignored for pathways.
Prompting Notes
For best results:
Specify conditions that the agent should transfer to a human under (examples are great!)
In the task, refer to the action solely as “transfer” or “transferring”.
Alternate phrasing such as “swap” or “switch” can mislead the agent, causing the action to be ignored.
Give your agent the ability to transfer calls to a set of phone numbers. This option will be ignored for pathways.Overrides transfer_phone_number if a transfer_list.default is specified.Will default to transfer_list.default, or the chosen phone number.Example usage to route calls to different departments:
Select a supported language of your choice.
Optimizes every part of our API for that language - transcription, speech, and other inner workings.
Expand to view language options
The available language options are as follows:
babel - Babel (All Languages) - Experimental1
en - English
babel-en - English (Babel)
en-US - English (US)
en-GB - English (UK)
en-AU - English (Australia)
en-NZ - English (New Zealand)
en-IN - English (India)
es - Spanish
babel-es - Spanish (Babel)
es-419 - Spanish (Latin America)
fr - French
babel-fr - French (Babel)
fr-CA - French (Canada)
de - German
babel-de - German (Babel)
el - Greek
hi - Hindi
hi-Latn - Hindi (Latin script)
hu - Hungarian
ja - Japanese
ko - Korean
ko-KR - Korean (Korea)
vi - Vietnamese
pt - Portuguese
pt-BR - Portuguese (Brazil)
pt-PT - Portuguese (Portugal)
zh - Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified)
zh-CN - Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified, China)
zh-Hans - Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified, Hans)
zh-TW - Chinese (Mandarin, Traditional)
zh-Hant - Chinese (Mandarin, Traditional, Hant)
it - Italian
nl - Dutch
pl - Polish
ru - Russian
sv - Swedish
sv-SE - Swedish (Sweden)
da - Danish
da-DK - Danish (Denmark)
fi - Finnish
no - Norwegian
id - Indonesian
ms - Malay
tr - Turkish
uk - Ukrainian
bg - Bulgarian
cs - Czech
ro - Romanian
sk - Slovak
auto - Auto Detect (English & Spanish)
1 The Bland Babel Transcription Engine (BETA) is our new proprietary transcription engine! Babel can handle multilingual conversations by identifying and switching languages on the fly. It’s now in beta and available under the “babel” language mode.
Note: For pathway calls and prompts, make sure to prompt your agent to respond in the language they are spoken to.
When true, automatically selects a “from” number that matches the callee’s area code for US-based calls. Must have purchased a local dialing add-on in the add-ons section.
Configure SMS settings for voicemail notifications. If a voicemail is left, an SMS message is sent to the “to” number. Requires SMS configuration.Properties:
from (string): The phone number to send the SMS from
message (string): The message template to send when a voicemail is left
Example:
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{ "to": "+18001234567", "message": "You have a new voicemail!"}
When true, the system will ignore DTMF input (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) — the tones generated when a user presses keys on their phone keypad (e.g., 0-9, *, #).
This disables any in-call actions triggered by keypad input, such as menu navigation or transfers.
Useful when your agent should handle the entire call conversationally, without responding to button presses.
Set the timezone for the call. Handled automatically for calls in the US.This helps significantly with use cases that rely on appointment setting, scheduling, or behaving differently based on the time of day.Timezone options are here in the TZ identifier column.
Custom key-value data you send with the call. This information is available as variables inside your prompt, pathway, or tools — but only if the call is answered.
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{ "task": "Say hello to the user, who's name is {{name}}", "request_data": { "name": "John Doe" } }
The time you want the call to start. If you don’t specify a time (or the time is in the past), the call will send immediately.Set your time in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS -HH:MM (ex. 2021-01-01 12:00:00 -05:00).The timezone is optional, and defaults to UTC if not specified.Note: Scheduled calls can be cancelled with the POST /v1/calls/:call_id/stop endpoint.
When the AI encounters a voicemail, it will leave this message after the beep and then immediately end the call.Warning: If ivr_mode is set to true or voicemail_action is set to ignore, then this will still work for voicemails, but it will not hang up for IVR systems.
If the call goes to voicemail, you can set up the call to retry, after a configurable delay. You can also update the voicemail_action, and voicemail_message in the retry object, for the re-tried call.Takes in the following parameters:
wait (integer): The delay in seconds before the call is retried.
voicemail_action (enum): The action to take when the call goes to voicemail. Options: hangup, leave_message, ignore.
voicemail_message (string): The message to leave when the call goes to voicemail.
Example:
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{ "retry_config": { "wait": 10, "voicemail_action": "leave_message", "voicemail_message": "Hello, this is a test message." }}
When the call starts, a timer is set for the max_duration minutes. At the end of that timer, if the call is still active it will be automatically ended.Example Values: 20, 2
To record your phone call, set record to true. When your call completes, you can access through the recording_url field in the call details or your webhook.
Add any additional information you want to associate with the call. This data is accessible for all calls, regardless of if they are picked up or not. This can be used to track calls or add custom data to the call.Anything that you put here will be returned in the post call webhook under metadata.Example:
The citation schema is an incredibly powerful tool for running post call analysis, including specific variable extractions, conditional logic, and more.You can build a citation schema here.After building the citation schema (or schemas), you can copy their UUIDs and reference them in your API request for outgoing calls (and you can also attach them to your inbound phone numbers).Here’s an example:
Note: Citation schemas are very powerful and accurate, but also are more resource intensive to run. As such, for the time being, they are an enterprise-only feature.
The analysis preset UUID used to analyze the call, must be created on the analysis presets page.All fields in the preset configuration are filled at the end of the call by analyzing the transcript.Example:
An array of disposition tags. Uopon call completion, the AI will evaluate the transcripts of the call and assign one of the tags to the “disposition_tag” field. Tags are assigned exclusively by looking at the transcript and no other information.Example:
The geospatial dialing pool UUID. This is an enterprise only feature, to use this feature contact your Bland representative or reach out to sales.Example:
A sequence of DTMF digits that will be played before the call starts. Acceptable characters are 0-9, *, #, and w, where w is a pause of 0.5 seconds.
Example:
For validation errors, a detailed list of each field with an error and it’s error message.Example:
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{ "status": "error", "message": "Invalid parameters", "errors": [ "Missing required parameter: phone_number.", "Missing required parameter: task.", "Phone number must be a string or number.", "Task must be a string." ]}