You use the Dialer Settings page to define settings that relate to the use of an autodialer. This page does not display if you have not selected the autodialer option.

You can change the default values of these settings, so that your custom settings will be used whenever a new project is created. See Changing the default settings.

Deselect this option to block the caller’s telephone number from displayed to the called party when the autodialer makes a call.

By default, the caller’s telephone number is provided by a setting on the autodialer. To specify the caller’s telephone number, enter the number in this field. The phone number should contain only the digits 0 to 9 and the following characters: #, *, ., (, ), -, and /. The number may optionally be preceded by a plus character (+). The presence of any other characters might cause caller identification to fail.

If one or more autodialers have been added to the Dialer Administration activity in UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer, every telephone interviewer station (that is, any computer on which the Phone Participants activity will be used) must be assigned a position name. When a position name is entered in Phone Participants, UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer validates the name against those defined in the Dialer Administration activity.

For projects that use an autodialer, you can choose whether stations with unrecognized positions can be used to conduct interviews (that is, Phone Participants will still open). If so, manual dialing must be used on those stations. If you select this check box, Phone Participants will not open on a station with an unrecognized position and an error message will be displayed instead.

For more information, see Dialer Administration.

You can choose the minimum length of time that an unanswered phone call must ring before the autodialer terminates the call. To change the ring time, enter the number of seconds in this field. Make sure that you set a value that allows participants plenty of time to pick up the phone. In addition, your local laws might specify the minimum value that you must use.

Silent calls can occur when an autodialer generates more calls than there are interviewers available to handle the calls. You can specify the name of a wave-sound (.wav) file that contains a message that will be played to the participant when a silent call occurs. To do so, enter the name of the .wav file in this field (for example, SilentCall.wav). The .wav file must be in the autodialer’s “audio” folder, the location of which is defined in the autodialer’s dialer.ini file. To specify a .wav file that is in a subfolder of the audio folde, include a relative path, for example, Projects\MyProject\SilentCall.wav.

Make sure that the name and path are correct, because UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer does not log an error if it cannot find the .wav file.

When a telephone interviewer clicks the Start Dialing button on the main screen of the Phone Participants activity, the autodialer attempts to connect the interviewer to a participant. If the number of connected calls being generated by the autodialer is low compared with the number of interviewers available to handle the calls, there might be a delay of several minutes or more before the interviewer is connected.

You can choose the numbers of minutes that interviewers must wait to be connected to a participant before the autodialer cancels the connection attempt, allowing interviewers to leave their stations if they need to. To change the wait time, enter the number of minutes in this field.

You can choose the percentage of calls that the autodialer will record. Both individual questions and entire calls are recorded, and the recordings are saved as sound files in the autodialer’s file system. To record calls, enter a whole number from 0 to 100 inclusive in this field. To record no calls or all calls, enter 0 or 100 respectively. If you enter any other value, that percentage of calls will be selected at random for recording, with the following exceptions:

When you change this setting, there might be a delay of up to a minute before the new value takes effect.

For more information, search for “Recording Calls and Interviews” in the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library.

Answering machine detection (AMD) can be useful when dialing residential numbers. It is based on the observation that human greetings are usually short, whereas answering machine messages are long. When an auto-dialed participant record is dialed, and the dialer detects that an answering machine picked up the call, the call is automatically ended with the Answering Machine call outcome when the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer is properly configured to support the feature.

Select the appropriate answering machine detection mode from the menu.

This field allows you to define specific AMD parameters. For more information, see Configuring answering machine detection.

You can specify the name of a wave-sound (.wav) file that contains a message that will be played when answering machine detection occurs. To do so, enter the name of the .wav file in this field (for example, AMD.wav). The .wav file must be in the autodialer’s “audio” folder, the location of which is defined in the autodialer’s dialer.ini file. To specify a .wav file that is in a sub folder of the audio folder, include a relative path, for example, Projects\MyProject\AMD.wav.

Make sure that the name and path are correct, because UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer does not log an error if it cannot find the .wav file.

The next three headings in this topic apply only when you have selected the Dialer (Group/Predictive) – Show Start Dialing button on the Interviewer screen option on the Phone Interview Settings page (see Interview Settings).

You can set the initial “aggressiveness” of the autodialing system when it calculates the number of predictive calls to make. A higher aggressiveness setting can lead to less wait time for interviewers, but might result in more silent calls. To change the aggressiveness setting, enter a whole number between 1 and 1000 in this field.

To stop the autodialing system from dialing predictively, set Initial dialing aggressiveness to 0. In this mode, the autodialer dials participants only when interviewers click the Start Dialing button in the Phone Participants activity, which is unlikely to result in silent calls.

You can specify the maximum percentage of silent calls that are allowed to occur in the 24 hour period since midnight. If the actual rate of silent calls approaches this value, the autodialing system reduces the current rate of predictive calls to ensure that the maximum percentage of silent calls is not exceeded. To change the maximum percentage, enter a decimal number in this field.

You can specify the target percentage of silent calls that should occur at any time. The autodialing system attempts to keep the actual rate of silent calls at this value by continually adjusting the current rate of predictive calls. To change the target percentage, enter a decimal number in this field. The value must be less than the value of Maximum percentage of silent calls.

The Dialers tab in the Interviewer Monitoring activity (see Monitoring silent calls) shows the percentage of silent calls that are occurring for this project. To set that percentage figure to zero, click this button on the Dialer Settings page.

If you find that for every new project you always change the settings on the Dialer Settings page to the same new values, you can instead change the default settings that UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer provides so that you no longer need to do this. For more information, see Changing the default settings.