Dial modes

The dropdown on each list card picks how ColdDialr dials. There are three modes, and the difference matters — for how the session feels, and for how hard it is on the phone numbers you call from.

Direct Dial

One call at a time, straight through to you.

ColdDialr calls a person, you hear it ring, and if they pick up you’re talking. There’s no detection layer in between, so nothing gets misread and nothing gets clipped — you hear exactly what happens.

It’s the slowest of the three and the gentlest on your numbers. It’s also always available: whatever else a list has been through, Direct Dial is the floor.

Busy means done, in this mode

On Direct Dial a busy signal exhausts that prospect on the first hit rather than the fourth. If you want them tried again, book a callback or reset them later.

AMD (auto-detect)

ColdDialr works out whether a human or a machine picked up, before bridging you in.

AMD stands for answering machine detection. The call is placed, the answer is listened to, and only a human gets handed to you. A machine gets handled as a machine — which is where voicemail drop comes in, if your account has it: a pre-recorded message plays onto the answering machine and the session moves on once the audio finishes, not the moment you click.

You skip listening to voicemail greetings all day. The trade is a short pause at the start of each answered call while the detection runs, and the occasional wrong call — a slow human read as a machine, or the other way round.

Good for lists with lots of desk phones and voicemail; less good when you expect most answers to be mobile and human.

Parallel

Two to five lines ring at once. The first human to answer gets you; the rest are hung up.

You pick how many lines when you choose the mode (2, 3, 4 or 5). During the session a Lines panel shows the slots filling and emptying as calls go out and come back.

It’s much faster than the other two, and it’s the hardest on everything else:

• Every wave places several calls to win one conversation, and each loser is a cancelled ring on somebody’s phone.
• That’s exactly the pattern carriers score as spam, so parallel spends your caller-ID reputation faster than anything else you can do.

Worth it on a big fresh list where speed is the point. Not worth it on a list you’ll be working for weeks.

Why an option is sometimes missing

Modes narrow as a list gets worked. If one is gone, there’s a small i next to the dropdown — hover it and it tells you exactly why.

What happened	What you lose
The list has run 3 parallel sessions	Parallel. Direct and AMD stay.
The list has run 2 AMD sessions	AMD.
Both	Direct Dial only.
The list allows toll-free numbers	Parallel, permanently.

The toll-free rule is the one that never bends, for anyone. Toll-free numbers bill the person being called, per minute, and a parallel wave makes several of them pay for a ring that gets cancelled. That cost lands on someone else, so it isn’t ours to waive.

For owners and admins

Owners and admins aren’t subject to the session limits at all — the assumption being that if you’re spending the reputation, you meant to.

Two levers exist for handing that allowance to an agent:

• Bypass the parallel limit on a specific list, which lifts the parallel cap for everyone dialing it. It does not touch the AMD limit or the toll-free rule.
• Import more prospects. An import that adds 50 or more new leads resets the list’s mode counters, and the allowances start over. The limits stand for goodwill spent against a set of numbers — a genuinely restocked list hasn’t spent it. Topping up ten rows earns nothing, deliberately.

Which one to pick

• Learning a list, or a small careful one → Direct Dial.
• Lots of voicemail, and you have a drop recorded → AMD.
• Big fresh list, and you want volume today → Parallel, at 2 or 3 lines to start.

If you’re not sure, Direct Dial is never the wrong answer — just the slower one.

Related: Making calls for the whole flow, and Caller IDs and spam scores for what the modes are actually spending.