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Overview

This guide shows how to make an outgoing call and greet the call recipient with a text-to-speech message when they answer. Use cases such as voice notifications and alerts, voice surveys, and, voice one-time passwords involve outbound calls as part of their call flow.You can start making and receiving calls either by using our PHLO visual workflow builder or our APIs and XML documents. Follow the instructions in one of the tabs below.
  • Using XML
Here’s how to use Plivo APIs and XML to make an outbound call and leave a text-to-speech message when the recipient answers the call.

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How it works

Outbound Call Flow
Plivo requests an answer URL when the call is answered (step 4) and expects the file at that address to hold a valid XML response from the application with instructions on how to handle the call. To see how this works, you can use https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.plivo.com/answer.xml as an answer URL to test your first outgoing call. The file contains this XML code:
<Response>
<Speak>Congratulations! You've made your first outbound call!</Speak>
</Response>
This code instructs Plivo to say, “Congratulations! You’ve made your first outbound call!” to the call recipient. You can find the entire list of valid Plivo XML verbs in our XML Reference documentation.

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Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. You can also follow our instructions to set up a Node.js development environment.

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Make an outbound call

Create a file called Makecall.js and paste into it this code.
var plivo = require('plivo');

(function main() {
    'use strict';

    var client = new plivo.Client("<auth_id>","<auth_token>");
    client.calls.create(
        "<caller_id>", // from
        "<destination_number>", // to
        "https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.plivo.com/answer.xml", // answer url
        {
            answerMethod: "GET",
        },
    ).then(function (response) {
        console.log(response);
    }, function (err) {
        console.error(err);
    });
})();
Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234).

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Test

Save the file and run it.
$ node Makecall.js