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Choose the right voice product

Voice on Devotel Orbit has three outbound surfaces. Pick the wrong one and you end up re-platforming the flow a month in. This page routes you to the right one once, then links deeper setup guides for each.

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Three surfaces, three jobs

Browser softphone — a human agent talks. Place and answer PSTN calls from a browser (or embedded SIP/web client), with queues, extensions, hold, transfer, and disposition codes. Set it up with the browser softphone guide. Outbound dialer — a campaign dials a list, agents take answered calls. Predictive, progressive, preview, and agentless modes with pacing, DNC scrubbing, abandon-rate ceilings, and dispositions built in. Set it up with the outbound dialer campaign guide. POST /voice/calls — your server originates a call with one request. One-off programmatic legs: a reminder, a page-cast, a click-to-call from your CRM, or a dial leg inside a programmable flow. Program what happens when the callee answers either inline (staticVerbs) or by pointing the call at a URL on your server (answer_url). See the Voice API reference for the request shape and the programmable DSL reference for the verb vocabulary.

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Decision table

All three surfaces read the same call log after the fact — pick a surface on who DRIVES the call, not on where the record lands.

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Common workflows mapped

A BDR team working leads. The person decides when to dial and what to say, so a person drives the call: give them the browser softphone. If the team also uploads a shared list and works it top-down, that list belongs in the dialer even when humans talk — see the hybrid note below. A scheduled appointment reminder. Your scheduler fires POST /voice/calls per appointment with staticVerbs — a say with the reminder text, optionally a gather to confirm or rebook. No list, no agent, one request per reminder. If the reminder must offer “press 1 for an agent,” let the verb sequence dial the queue or ring group. A canary ops page-cast. Your alerting runbook posts one call per on-call rotation with an answer_url; when the engineer answers, your server returns the verbs — read back the alert and offer a dial-leg into the incident bridge. The fallback (answer_fallback) decides what the callee hears if your endpoint is unreachable.

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Hybrid patterns

Start with POST /voice/calls when volume is small or trigger-driven: a few hundred reminders a day, internal tooling, a new-segment experiment. Move the flow to the dialer when you need campaign machinery the API surface deliberately lacks — ordered priority across contacts, pacing that respects agent availability and the abandonment ceiling, DNC persisted across campaigns, and disposition-driven retries. The softphone and the API also coexist: an agent works inbound queues on the softphone while your back office originates product-click-to-call legs via POST /voice/calls that route into the same queues.

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Entry points per surface

• Softphone — Set up the browser (WebRTC) softphone, plus the embedded SDK demo if the client lives in your own app.
• Dialer — Launch an outbound dialer campaign; the exact request shapes sit in the dialer API reference.
• Programmatic calls — POST /voice/calls on the Voice API reference; the DSL verbs (say, gather, dial, hangup, …) are catalogued in the programmable voice DSL reference.

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When NOT to expose the API

If the goal is to forward inbound PSTN calls to your own PBX or carrier rather than to originate AI-flow/agent legs on Orbit, you don’t want a call-origination API at all — you want a SIP trunk. Provision termination and origination trunks and route the numbers over them; the API surfaces above stay unused. See the SIP trunk setup guide.

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Glossary

AMD — Answering Machine Detection. The carrier flags the answered side as a person or a machine so a campaign can drop voicemails and a flow can branch. In the dialer it’s a campaign setting; over POST /voice/calls send amd: true. STIR/SHAKEN — the caller-ID attestation framework carriers use to grade how trustworthy your outbound number’s identity is. Orbit attaches the attestation level to each outbound leg so downstream networks treat verified calls accordingly; nothing for you to compute at call time. DNC — Do-Not-Call. The dialer enforces your workspace’s DNC registry before every attempt, and any contact can be scrubbed back into no-dial status from the suppression surfaces. Consent and quiet-hours are required before a contact enters a list at all — the dialer campaign guide walks the eligibility gates.

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Verify your choice

Dial one test call matching the surface you picked and confirm the path end to end: the softphone rings a browser, the dialer paces one list row to one agent, and POST /voice/calls returns 201 with a call id that appears in the shared call log. Then build the real flow on the surface that passed.