Twilio outbound voice call starts with delay

Question

I have just written my Twilio app to make an outbound voice call to my phone number in Indonesia.

When I answer the voice call, there is roughly 3-5 seconds of delay before the first audio plays, be it using <Say> or using <Play> verbs.

Do you guys know why this is the case and whether there is a current workaround to reduce this long delay to a mere 1-2 seconds? Recipients will most likely hang up the phone if there is no sound at all on the other end for too long.

Thanks in advance on any insight

Answer 1

I had this same problem - my outbound call to between 7 and 9 seconds to start playing the voicefile.

The process inside twilio ( from the delays measured when you look at each call with the http response time) accounted for about 3-4 seconds.

I also had AMD (Answering Machine Detection) on ie IfMachine=Continue.

(see documentation here 1. https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/voice/can-twilio-tell-whether-a-call-was-answered-by-a-human-or-machine 2. https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/answering-machine-detection)

I removed this option from the call and the call start time reduced by 3 seconds down to about 5 seconds on average.

I think this is due to the AMD feature listening to the first few seconds of the call to determine if it was in fact answered by a human or a machine.

So, turn off AMD.