Two-way conversation calls run ₹4–5 a minute. One-way announcements run ₹1.3–1.5. That is roughly a third of the price for the same phone network and the same voice — and a great many calls that get built as conversations never needed to be.
What an announcement actually is
The agent plays a single spoken message the instant the call connects, then hangs up. No speech recognition, no language model in the loop, and the audio is generated once and cached — so the message starts almost immediately rather than after a pipeline warms up.
Because there is no model deciding anything, there is no per-call AI cost, and the calls can be dialled in parallel rather than paced by a conversation-concurrency limit. A thousand phones can ring at nearly the same moment.
The test
One question: does the answer change anything?
If the person's reply feeds a decision — are they qualified, are they interested, when can they start — you need a conversation, because the reply is the product. If the call exists to put information into someone's ear, an announcement does exactly the same job for a third of the money.
Examples that only need one way:
- "Your interview is confirmed for Tuesday at 10 AM."
- "Your order is out for delivery today between 2 and 5."
- "Class is cancelled tomorrow due to the strike."
- "There is a water supply interruption in your block from 9 AM."
In every one, a spoken "okay" from the recipient changes nothing you would act on.
The middle case, and the mode people forget
Sometimes you need exactly one bit back. Confirm or reschedule. Attending or not. Keep receiving these calls or stop.
Running a full conversational agent for a yes/no is expensive and, on a poor line, unreliable — speech recognition is the part most likely to fail, and you have introduced it to collect one bit. A keypad (DTMF) agent handles this properly: it plays a short menu, reads the key pressed, and acts on it. No speech recognition anywhere in the loop, so it works on any handset at any signal strength, and every keypress is logged.
It also gives you a clean, auditable opt-out — press 9, and future calls to that number are suppressed automatically. That is worth having on any campaign large enough to annoy someone.
A worked example
Two thousand interview confirmations a month, 40 seconds each.
- As two-way conversations at ₹4.5/min: about ₹6,000.
- As announcements at ₹1.5/min: about ₹2,000.
Same information delivered, ₹4,000 saved, and the announcements finish in a fraction of the wall-clock time because they dial in parallel. If you also need the confirm/reschedule answer, a keypad menu gets it for close to the announcement price.
Mixing them
Most real workflows use more than one. Screen with a conversation, confirm with an announcement, collect the reschedule with a keypad menu. It is set per agent, so there is nothing to build — you make three agents and point each at the job it suits.
See the current per-minute rates, or read the documentation for how each mode is configured.