What is the TCPA?

The direction is the whole point. The TCPA is about calls made to people, and its consent machinery exists because those calls are unwanted.

In February 2024 the FCC ruled that an AI-generated voice counts as an artificial or prerecorded voice under the Act. That ruling addressed outbound calls, with penalties starting at $500 a call.

An inbound line is a different situation. The consumer dialed you, so there is no consent question about the call itself.

Say a dental practice has 300 patients who haven't visited in two years, and someone suggests having an AI voice call them all with a friendly reminder. It sounds harmless. Every one of those people chose the practice once.

Under the TCPA this is an outbound call using an artificial voice, which is the exact situation the Act's consent rules were written for. A person who receives such a call without having given the right kind of consent can sue, and the statute sets damages at $500 per violation, rising to as much as $1,500 where the violation was willful. Multiply the lower figure by 300 calls and the exposure for one afternoon's campaign is $150,000. Whether these particular patients consented, and to what, is a question for a lawyer reading the practice's actual intake forms. "They're our patients" is not, by itself, an answer.

You'll read a lot of confident legal writing on AI phone vendors' sites, and much of it is wrong in ways you can spot without a law degree.

Check the direction first. For every rule the page cites, ask whether it's about calls a business places or calls a business receives. A page that quotes per-call penalties while selling you an inbound answering product has mixed the two up.

Look for dates next. Telephone rules moved quickly through 2024 and 2025, with rulings issued, challenged and in one case thrown out by a court. A page that gives no "as of" date can't be relied on, however sure it sounds.

Finally, check for sources. A real citation names the statute section, the agency order or the court case, so you can hand it to your own attorney. "Regulations require" with nothing after it is a sales sentence, and it deserves the weight you'd give any other sales sentence.

GreetKeeper answers inbound calls only and makes no outbound calls, which keeps the outbound framework off your line by design rather than by argument.

The rules reaching inbound are about disclosure. Maine's chatbot law has applied since October 2025, and Utah's spoken-notice rule for licensed professions since May 2025.

Disclosure is a setting you control. For a licensed profession, the sensible setup speaks it in the opening line.