Having some trouble capturing phone numbers
Anyone else had this issue? I feel like the ai doesn’t do a great job at capturing phone numbers, always gets one or two digits wrong, and if I set it as an entity it will keep asking the user to repeat themselves. I have been trying to set up capturing through dtmf but I am not sure how to do this.
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Tips for reliably collecting a phone number over Voice (Twilio/Vonage)
1. Build a
• (Optional) Allow common separators with a second rule “Dashes or spaces are ok – ignore them.” 2. Configure your Capture step • Switch to Entities and choose the
• Turn Automatic Reprompts ON – the LLM will generate clearer follow-up questions instead of the generic “Sorry, can you repeat that?”
• Set a No-Reply timeout (e.g. 8 s) so the call doesn’t hang if the caller pauses. 3. Prime the caller for better speech-to-text Prompt examples:
• Capture step & automatic reprompts – https://docs.voiceflow.com
• Entity rules examples (phone number) – https://docs.voiceflow.com
PhoneNumber entity
• Add a rule such as “Must be exactly 10 digits, numbers only.”• (Optional) Allow common separators with a second rule “Dashes or spaces are ok – ignore them.” 2. Configure your Capture step • Switch to Entities and choose the
PhoneNumber entity you just made.• Turn Automatic Reprompts ON – the LLM will generate clearer follow-up questions instead of the generic “Sorry, can you repeat that?”
• Set a No-Reply timeout (e.g. 8 s) so the call doesn’t hang if the caller pauses. 3. Prime the caller for better speech-to-text Prompt examples:
“I’ll need your 10-digit phone number. Please say each digit one at a time – for example ‘416-5-5-5-1-2-3-4’.”This drastically improves STT accuracy compared with callers reading the number quickly. 4. Add an Exit Scenario after two failed attempts If the entity is still not valid, route to a message like “I’m having trouble hearing that. You can also text your number to this line and we’ll continue.” --- About using DTMF instead of speech Voiceflow’s current telephony interface lets you send DTMF tones (e.g. with the Call Forwarding step’s Extension field) but it does not yet expose a built-in way to capture inbound DTMF digits as user input. For now the recommended approach is the speech capture method above. (If you need full IVR-style keypad data entry you can lodge a feature request in the community – many builders are asking for the same thing.) --- Documentation:
• Capture step & automatic reprompts – https://docs.voiceflow.com
• Entity rules examples (phone number) – https://docs.voiceflow.com