AI outbound calling with voice agents
Bolna voice agents call your contacts and handle the conversation themselves. Upload a CSV or call the API, and the agent works through your list in 20+ languages.
What is AI outbound calling?
AI outbound calling means a voice AI agent places phone calls to your contacts and handles the whole conversation itself. It listens with speech-to-text, decides what to say with a large language model, and replies out loud with text-to-speech.
Teams use it for calls they make at volume, like qualifying leads, confirming cash-on-delivery orders, recovering abandoned carts and sending reminders. On Bolna you upload a list of numbers or call the API, and the agent works through it in 20+ languages, including Hindi, Hinglish, Tamil and Telugu.
How outbound calling works on Bolna
Build the agent
Write the prompt and pick the voice, language and models in Agent Studio, or create the agent through the API.
Choose the number it calls from
Use Bolna's shared numbers, buy a dedicated number from Bolna, connect your own Twilio, Plivo, Exotel or Vobiz account, or place calls over your own SIP trunk.
Load your contacts
Start a single call from the dashboard or the Make Call API, or upload a CSV under Deploy → Batches. Extra columns such as a name or order ID are passed to the agent as context for that call.
Set the calling rules
Limit calls to an allowed time window checked in each recipient's local timezone, turn on voicemail detection, and retry calls that end as no-answer, busy or failed.
Track every outcome
Watch batch progress in the dashboard, and receive each call's status and retry history on your webhook.
What you get for outbound campaigns
What teams use AI outbound calling for
Lead qualification
Call new leads quickly, ask your qualifying questions and pass the ready ones to sales.
COD order confirmation
Confirm cash-on-delivery orders by phone before they are dispatched.
Cart abandonment recovery
Call shoppers who left items in their cart. Hypothesis completed 100K+ recovery calls with Bolna and recovered ₹1 Cr+ in revenue.
Candidate screening
Phone-screen applicants by asking every candidate the same questions.
Surveys and NPS
Run phone surveys and NPS calls across a whole customer list.
Frequently asked questions
AI outbound calling is when a voice AI agent places calls to your contacts and holds the conversation on its own, using speech-to-text to listen, a large language model to decide what to say, and text-to-speech to reply.
Yes. On Bolna you can start a single call from the dashboard or the API, or upload a CSV of contacts as a batch and run it now or on a schedule. The agent calls each number, and extra CSV columns are passed to it as context.
The rules depend on the country and the type of call, so check them for your market before you launch. In India, commercial and telemarketing calls must come from regulated numbers under TRAI guidelines: 140-series numbers for promotional calls and 160-series numbers for transactional and service calls, both of which need DLT registration. Many regions also limit when you can call, which is why Bolna can restrict calls to an allowed window in each recipient's local time.
Trial accounts can run up to 2 calls at once, to verified numbers only. Paid accounts start at 10 concurrent calls and scale automatically with monthly usage, and enterprise plans get higher limits. Calls above your limit are queued and dial as active calls finish.
With auto-retry on, Bolna calls again when a call ends as no-answer, busy or failed. You choose up to 3 retries and the delay before each one, and retrying on voicemail is off by default.
Pay-as-you-go starts at $0.06 per minute (about ₹5.52), with speech-to-text, the LLM and text-to-speech included when the agent uses the bundled models. Telephony and the platform fee are added per minute, and every new account gets $5 in free credits.
Plan your first outbound campaign
Walk through your call flow with the Bolna team, or read the docs and start a batch yourself.