The answering machine detection in your dialer costs nothing on the invoice — and it may be the most expensive line item in your operation. Here's the math.
The AMD built into Vicidial is free in the only sense that matters to a spreadsheet: it never appears on one. There is no per-call charge, no monthly fee, no contract. You flip it on in amd.conf and it works.
But "free" AMD is not free. It is a heuristic — Asterisk app_amd timing silences and greetings — that classifies the answer of a call by stopwatch instead of by sound. That trade-off has a price. It just gets paid out of buckets your accounting never connects back to AMD: dropped revenue, regulatory risk, idle agents, wasted carrier minutes, and DIDs you have to keep replacing. Here is each bucket, with the math.
1. Dropped live leads
Stock AMD's headline failure is the false positive: it decides a real person is a machine and hangs up. Heuristic Asterisk AMD runs around 70–85% accuracy and wrongly drops 5–15% of live humans. Every one of those is a prospect who answered the phone and got dial tone back.
