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Your agent can pick up the phone. Tell Dairo who to call and what to accomplish, and a natural-sounding AI agent dials the number, has the conversation, and hands you back a transcript, a written summary, and the exact cost. The whole product is the instructions field. There is no dialog tree to build, no audio to stream, and no telephony to configure — you write what the call should achieve, the way you would brief a colleague, and the agent handles the conversation:
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Phone uses three scopes: phone:read for numbers, calls, transcripts, and recordings; phone:write for buying, configuring, and releasing numbers; and phone:call for placing or hanging up a call. Grant all three to a key that manages numbers and runs calls. Give an agent that should only read outcomes phone:read alone — its key can never make anyone’s phone ring.

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A call is a job, not a live session

Placing a call is asynchronous. The POST returns at once with a call id and status: "queued" — the phone starts ringing after your request has already come back. From there you poll the call; there is no media session to manage and no socket to hold open:
When the call ends, its duration, cost, and a one-paragraph summary are stamped onto the call object, and the turn-by-turn transcript is ready to fetch. A call moves through these statuses: Once a call reaches a terminal status it never changes again — completed, failed, no_answer, busy, and canceled are the five ways a call ends.

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What a call costs

Calls are billed per started minute — a 61-second call bills as two minutes — and the rate depends on the destination. When the call reaches a terminal status, the exact price lands on it as costUsd, so you read the cost from the call object with no rate table to reconcile. A call nobody answers costs nothing. maxDurationSeconds (default 600, up to 1800) is your cost ceiling: Dairo ends the call when it hits the cap, so a chatty callee can never run up an open-ended bill. Owning a number also carries a monthly fee, shown as monthlyCostUsd when you search for numbers.

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When to pick up the phone

A call is interruptive — it demands attention right now. That is its strength and the reason to use it sparingly:
  • Call when immediacy matters and you need a human acknowledgment: an on-call escalation, a delivery about to fail, a time-critical confirmation, reaching someone who doesn’t watch a screen.
  • Email when you need a record, an attachment, or the recipient should respond on their own schedule.
  • SMS when a one-line nudge is enough — a phone number bound to a unified inbox sends and receives texts next to your mail.
You are putting an AI on a live line with real people, and that comes with duties: disclosure, consent, recording rules, caller-id rules. The Compliance page covers them — read it before your first production call.

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Next steps

Making calls

Place a call, poll it, read the transcript and summary, hang up early.

Phone numbers

Search, buy, and configure the numbers your calls come from.

Voices

Choose the voice and language your calls speak.

Compliance

AI disclosure, consent, recording, and caller-id rules.