Lesson 4
Advanced Call and Batch Operations
This lesson delves into advanced call and batch operations, including batch analysis and management.
Learning Objectives:
Send and manage batches of calls using POST operations
Analyze batches with AI and stop active batches using POST operations
List batches and retrieve batch details with GET operations
Batch call operations can give you two pieces of great functionality for large call volumes.
1
Sending a large number of calls with a simple prompt (Simple Batch)
2
Initiating a large-scale “campaign” (Campaign Batch)
Making a Simple Batch Call via Bland API
Request Header
Standard Bland Authorization Header and Content-Type of application/json
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: [API Token]
Request Body
base_prompt
This is the prompt or task used for all the phone calls in the request. Information can be inserted by surrounding variable names with {{curly braces}}.
call_data
This holds the list of each call to be made in your batch.. Each call in call_data MUST have a “phone_number” property. Properties are case-sensitive.
from
The phone number to originate the calls from.
label
Adds a user-friendly label to your batch to keep track of it’s original intended use. This can help differentiate multiple call batches that are part of the same campaign. Shown when a batch is retrieved.
campaign_id
This will be used for starting batch calls within a more complex campaign (including pathways).
test_mode
(true/false) Includes additional information in the response to make any issues easier to find.
Let’s look at an example request body and Postman request:
{
base_prompt: "You are calling {{business}} to renew their subscription to {{service}} before it expires on {{date}}.",
"from": "1238889784",
"label": "Renewal agent Batch Call",
"call_data":
[
{
"phone_number": "1234567890",
"business": "ABC Corp",
"service": "Netflix",
"date": "September 4th"
},
{
"phone_number": "32176540987",
"business": "XYZ inc.",
"service": "Window Cleaning",
"date": "December 20th"
}
]
}
Analyzing Your Batch Calls With AI
This enables you to assess whether or not your batch calls are working as intended and to pull out insights from ongoing calls. This is also done via the Bland REST API.
Please note:
You can set your “from” number in the API request. This will need to be a number owned by that Twilio account (and not one purchased through Bland).
If a “from” is not specified a number listed in the specified Twilio account will be randomly selected..
Request Header
Standard Bland Authorization Header and Content-Type of application/json
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: [API Token]
Request Header
In your URL Path, you will specify the specific batch_id you want to assess.
Request Body
Goal
This is the overall purpose of the batch of calls. Provides context for the analysis to guide how the questions/transcripts are interpreted.
questions
This is a list of lists. Each question should be an array with two elements: the question text and the expected answer type (e.g., “string,” “boolean”).
Fairly flexible in terms of the expected answer type, and unanswerable questions will default to null.
"questions": [
["Who answered the call?", "human or voicemail"],
["Positive feedback about the product: ", "string"],
["Negative feedback about the product: ", "string"],
["Customer confirmed they were satisfied", "boolean"]
]
Response
status
Will say “success” if the request was successful.
message
Confirms the request was successful or provides an error message if the request failed.
answers
Contains the analyzed answers for each call in the batch.
The keys are call_ids from the batch, and the array values are the analysis results for each question in the batch. You’ll be able to derive your insight from these results. They can also be passed on to your own sentiment analysis model for creating indicators.
credits_used
Token-based price for the analysis request.
As a rough estimate, the base cost is 0.003 credits with an additional 0.0015 credits per call in the batch.
Longer call transcripts and higher numbers of questions can increase the cost. However, note that the cost scales more economically with batches compared to individual calls.
Example From Postman
Batch Call Details (REST API)
Batch details requests contain a massive amount of data on all calls performed during a single batch. To read the individual responses, please see the API documentation. We’ll learn how to assess these results in the next module.
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