Calling a Lead

Your team can call a lead from your organization’s phone number without giving out their own. Erdo rings the salesperson’s mobile first; when they answer and press 1, Erdo dials the lead and connects the two. The lead’s phone shows your organization’s number, so calling it back reaches your voice agent as usual. It is an ordinary phone call for the person placing it — earpiece, lock screen, other apps, call waiting — because their own phone is what rings. That matters when the sales desk is a mobile, which it usually is. The call is kept like every other: it appears in your call records and on the lead’s timeline, with who placed it, how long it lasted, what happened, and a transcript of both sides.

This is a person talking to a lead. It is not the live transfer, where your AI agent is already on a call and hands it to a colleague, and it is not an AI call — the agent is not on the line at all.

Before you start

Your organization needs a voice agent with its own phone number that Erdo bought and manages for you. A number you already owned and only told Erdo about cannot be called from: Erdo holds no credential for the account it lives on, and says so if you try.
Which countries can be reached is set on the phone account, not in Erdo. If a destination is not enabled, the call is refused and the record says exactly why, in the provider’s words.
The salesperson needs a phone number of their own for Erdo to ring. Nothing connects until somebody answers it and presses 1.

What happens, in order

Somebody presses Call on a lead.
Erdo checks that the number being called from is one of your organization’s own agent numbers, and that the lead is not on your do-not-call list.
The salesperson’s phone rings, showing your organization’s number.
They answer and hear “Press 1 to call Maria Lopez”.
On the key press, Erdo dials the lead. The lead’s phone rings about ten to fifteen seconds after the button was pressed, because of steps 3 and 4.
When the call ends, the record is updated, and the transcript appears a minute or two later.

A voicemail greeting cannot press 1, so a ring that goes to voicemail ends there — the lead’s phone never rings and is never connected to a voicemail box.

What the record says

A call somebody placed by hand carries two fields the AI agent’s calls do not:

Field	What it tells you
`placed_by_name`	Who placed it. Empty on every call the AI agent placed and on every inbound call.
`dial_outcome`	What became of the lead’s side: `answered`, `no_answer`, `busy`, `failed`, or `canceled` — the last meaning the lead was never dialled, because the person did not answer their own phone or did not press 1.

dial_outcome is not the same as status. A call can be completed with a no_answer outcome: the call happened, it just reached nobody. The duration is how long the two people were actually on the phone together, so a call nobody answered lasts zero seconds. Both fields appear everywhere calls do — the call records list and read, the erdo voice calls list output, and the erdo_voice_call_list / erdo_voice_call_get MCP tools.

The transcript

Both sides are recorded on separate channels and transcribed separately, then merged back into one conversation in time order — so who said what is a fact about which phone the audio came from, not a guess. It reads like any other call’s transcript: the person who placed the call is the agent side and the lead is the user side. If transcription fails — the transcription service is briefly unavailable, say — Erdo tries again on its own, over roughly the next day, so a transcript can arrive hours after the call rather than a minute or two. The call’s outcome and duration are recorded straight away either way. The summary says what was discussed, what was agreed and any next step, naming the person who placed the call. It is written in English whatever language the call was in, like every other call summary. The audio itself stays with the phone provider. Erdo keeps the transcript and the summary, and nothing in Erdo plays or hands out a recording.

Placing a call over the API

POST /v1/voice/person-calls, with your organization’s API key. There is no CLI command and no MCP tool for it, deliberately: the call rings a phone a specific person has to be holding and answer within about thirty seconds, so an agent or a scheduled script that “placed a call” would have started something only a human can finish. Reading calls back stays available everywhere.

curl -X POST https://api.erdo.ai/v1/voice/person-calls \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ERDO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "from_number": "+13055550100",
    "to_number": "(305) 555-0142",
    "recipient_name": "Maria Lopez",
    "canonical_lead_id": "0YQ0mBGRmvJRWWrDsPBQaB",
    "placed_by": { "ref": "user_2abc...", "name": "Ana" },
    "person_phone": "+13055550188",
    "prompt_language": "es"
  }'

from_number is the organization’s number to call from, and what the lead sees. The numbers it can be are listed in person_call_numbers on GET /v1/voice/phone-numbers (and the erdo_voice_phone_number_list MCP tool): offer only those, and no call is refused for its number.
to_number is the lead, in any format — Erdo normalises it.
canonical_lead_id is the lead, as its UUID or its 22-character lead reference. It is required, because it is how the call reaches that lead’s timeline.
placed_by.ref is your own stable identifier for the person placing the call. Erdo never resolves it; it uses it to hold them to one call at a time, and shows placed_by.name on the record.
person_phone is the phone Erdo rings first. It is not stored on the call record.
prompt_language is the language of the “press 1” prompt: en (the default), es or pt. Any other value is rejected with a 400 (invalid_argument) rather than spoken in a language the person may not understand.

A successful response says which call was started and what Erdo is about to dial:

{
  "call_id": "pcall_7k2m...",
  "from_number": "+13055550100",
  "to_number": "+13055550142",
  "to_country": "US",
  "person_phone": "+13055550188",
  "person_country": "US",
  "prompt_language": "es",
  "refused": false
}

Read the call back with GET /v1/voice/calls/{call_id} as it progresses and once it is over.

Numbers without a country code

A number with no + country code is read as US or Canada. A ten-digit Colombian or Mexican mobile typed without its country code looks exactly like a US number, and Erdo cannot tell the difference — which is why the response always says the number it is about to dial and the country it belongs to. Show that to whoever pressed the button; they are the only one who can spot it. A number that is not valid under that reading is refused rather than dialled.

When Erdo will not place the call

The response comes back with refused: true and a reason you can branch on, plus a message you can show:

`reason`	What happened
`number_not_managed`	`from_number` is not one of this organization’s voice agent numbers.
`number_externally_managed`	The number is on an account Erdo does not manage, so there is no credential to call with.
`lead_suppressed`	The lead is on your do-not-call list.
`invalid_number`	One of the numbers is not something Erdo can dial. The message names which.
`call_in_progress`	That person already has a call running. One at a time.
`provider_refused`	The phone provider would not place the call — the message carries its own words, such as a destination the account is not authorised to call. The attempt is still recorded, as a failed call.
`not_available_here`	Phone calling runs only in production, where your organization’s phone numbers live.

A refusal is always a 200. If the phone provider rejects the platform’s own telephony credentials, that is not a refusal of your call — nothing about the lead’s number or your settings was judged — so the request fails with a 503 (unavailable) instead, and the attempt is recorded as a failed call. It is a problem on Erdo’s side; report it rather than changing anything or retrying.

Good to know

Only the do-not-call list blocks a call. Quiet hours and rate limits exist to bound what an automation does unattended; when to call a lead is the judgement of the person picking up the phone. If you want a warning about the lead’s local time, that belongs in the surface with the button, not here.
Two legs cost about twice a single call, and more when the salesperson’s own phone is abroad. The usage lands on your organization’s own phone account.
A missed ring looks like a call from your own number. Somebody who misses it and calls back reaches your voice agent. Saving the number as a contact is worth suggesting to the team.
A call is capped at one hour, so one left open on a desk cannot run up minutes indefinitely.
Calls are not announced as recorded. Some jurisdictions require every party’s consent to a recording; that applies equally to your AI agent’s calls today, and is worth checking against where you operate.

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Features

Connect Erdo

Calling a Lead

Calling a Lead

Before you start

What happens, in order

What the record says

The transcript

Placing a call over the API

Numbers without a country code

When Erdo will not place the call

Good to know

​Calling a Lead

​Before you start

​What happens, in order

​What the record says

​The transcript

​Placing a call over the API

​Numbers without a country code

​When Erdo will not place the call

​Good to know

Calling a Lead

Before you start

What happens, in order

What the record says

The transcript

Placing a call over the API

Numbers without a country code

When Erdo will not place the call

Good to know