What is a robocall?

Outbound is in the definition. A robocall is something placed at a consumer, which is why the consent machinery exists at all.

In February 2024 the FCC ruled that an AI voice counts as an artificial or recorded voice under the TCPA. Penalties there start at $500 a call.

Not every robocall is unlawful. Calls the person agreed to in advance are treated differently, and so are some purely informational ones.

Say your assistant answers at 2:14 pm with its usual greeting, and the other end doesn't wait for it to finish. A recorded voice is already saying, "...about your Google Business listing. Your listing is not verified and may be removed. Press 1 now to speak with a specialist."

The assistant asks how it can help, the recording carries on as if nothing had been said, and after a second prompt with no sensible reply the call ends. It lasted 19 seconds. In your records it's easy to recognize. The caller's first words begin mid-sentence, since the recording started the moment the line connected. Nothing the caller says responds to anything the assistant said. And there's often a "press 1" instruction, which no human caller has ever spoken. Once you've seen three of these you can spot the pattern in a second and skip straight past it.

Plenty of automated calls are ones you'd miss if they stopped. Your pharmacy says a prescription is ready, the school district announces a snow day, and an airline tells you the gate has changed. These are robocalls in the plain sense of the word. They're generally lawful because of who's calling, what's being said, and whether you agreed to get them.

The ones worth reporting share a few marks. They're selling something, you never gave the caller your number, the caller ID looks local but leads nowhere when you call back, or the message pushes you to act right now. For a business line, the usual themes are your online listing, your card processing rates, and a loan you've supposedly been approved for.

In the US you can report them to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov and to the FCC through its consumer complaint center. A single report won't stop your phone ringing. Reports do feed the data carriers use to label and block numbers, so they help in aggregate.

GreetKeeper answers inbound calls only and places no outbound calls, which is a design decision rather than a temporary limitation.

The rules reaching inbound are about disclosure rather than consent. Maine's chatbot law is one, and Utah's spoken-notice rule for licensed professions is the other.

We never describe GreetKeeper as a robocaller or a voice bot, because neither word describes what it does.