Blog: Product
Test a SIP route from your browser: the web dialer
By the TelecomsXChange engineering team ยท
The web dialer is a phone inside the customer portal: your browser's microphone, SIP over a secure WebSocket, and a real call through your own route with the same relay, billing, recording and analysis as a call from your switch. Minutes after hangup you get the recording, transcript, verdict, MOS per leg and SIP ladder.
Why
Why a dialer belongs in a fraud-analysis portal
Most of what Open Voice Shield does happens to traffic your switch sends on its own. But the moment you want to provoke a call, to hear a route yourself, to check a new vendor before customers do, or to reproduce something a customer reported, you are back to a softphone, a test account on your switch, and a colleague on the other end. The web dialer removes that detour. The call still goes through your route, so what you hear and what the analysis reports is what your customers get.
Use cases
Six things people do with it
- Accept a new route before sending traffic
- Add the vendor as a destination, dial a handful of numbers through it, and read the results: post-dial delay, who hung up and the release cause, estimated MOS on each leg, and the transcript of what played. It takes ten minutes instead of a day of waiting for complaints.
- Check a route for delayed-playback FAS
- Some routes answer with silence or a recording and start the clock before the real party picks up. A test call through the dialer shows the answer time against the moment speech begins in the transcript, and the analysis flags the pattern. How delayed-playback FAS shows up covers what to look for.
- Hear what your customer hears
- A customer says calls to a destination sound robotic. Dial it through the same route, listen, then compare the jitter and loss on your leg and on the far leg. The estimated MOS tells you which side of the relay the problem is on.
- Test an IVR or a voice agent
- The keypad sends DTMF while the call is up, so you can walk a menu tree or drive a voice agent, and the recording keeps both sides for review.
- Check caller ID presentation
- Set the caller ID for the call and see how it arrives at a number you control. The account's phone number is the default; change it per call when a route needs a particular presentation.
- Produce evidence for a dispute
- Every dialer call is a call record like any other: recording, transcript, SIP ladder, media capture, per-leg quality, and a verdict in plain language. Export the report or open a case on it, and the vendor conversation starts from facts.
Under the hood
How a browser call travels
- You press Call. The portal asks the API for a short-lived dialer token, tied to your account and to the destination you picked.
- The browser captures your microphone and opens a secure WebSocket to the platform's SIP proxy. The INVITE carries the token, and the token admits the call in place of an IP whitelist.
- From there it is a normal call. The proxy checks your balance and ports, the media relay anchors and records both legs, and the call is routed to the destination the same way a call from your switch would be.
- While the far end rings you hear a ringback tone. When it answers, you hear the far end and it hears you. Hang up from the page, or wait for the far end to.
- After hangup the pipeline decodes the recording, transcribes it and analyses it, and the call record fills in: recording, transcript, verdict, per-leg quality, ladder.
Because the path is the production path, a test call is a production call: it is billed per second at your rate or drawn from your included minutes, and it counts against your ports while it is up. A test that takes a different path proves nothing about the route your customers use.
In the portal
Recents, redial, and calling from a record
The dialer page keeps a Recently called list of the calls placed from it, with when, the number, the caller ID, the duration, the status and the risk verdict. Each row has a redial, and once a call ends a Redial button sits under it. The caller ID field starts out as the phone number saved under Account, so you set it once. And any call in your records, whatever placed it, can be redialled: Call with dialer in the row menu of the calls table, or the Call button on the call detail page, opens the dialer with the number and the route that call used already filled in.
Before you dial
What you need, and what to expect
- A desktop browser. The page asks for microphone permission on the first call. Allow it for the portal's address.
- At least one destination on your account under Network. The dialer routes to the one you pick, or to your default.
- Balance or included minutes. The call is billed like any other, per second, after the minimum billable duration on your plan.
- Whether the far end displays your caller ID depends on the carriers in the path, as it does for every call.
- The web dialer is a preview feature. It is on by default and can be switched off per deployment. When it is off, the menu item disappears.
Summary
The takeaway
The web dialer turns "let me hear that route" into a click, and every test call becomes a call record with a recording, a transcript, a verdict and per-leg quality. Start with a destination you know, dial a number you control, and read what comes back. Then dial the route you are not sure about.
New here? Watch the six-minute tour, read getting started, or start free with $5 credit.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
What is a web dialer?
A web dialer is a phone that runs inside a web page: the browser captures your microphone, sends the audio over a secure WebSocket using SIP, and a server turns it into an ordinary SIP call. In Open Voice Shield the web dialer lives in the customer portal and places a real call through your own route, with nothing to install.
Is a call from the web dialer a real call?
Yes. It is admitted by a short-lived token instead of your switch's whitelisted IP, and from there it is treated like a call from your switch: routed to the destination you pick, billed per second, recorded, transcribed and analyzed. It appears in your call records with the same detail as any other call.
What can I test with a browser-based SIP dialer?
Route acceptance before you send traffic, delayed-playback FAS on a vendor route, what a customer hears on a given destination, an IVR or a voice agent with DTMF, caller ID presentation, and reproducing a complaint on demand. Each test call leaves a recording, a transcript, a verdict and per-leg quality you can share or attach to a dispute.
What do I need to use the Open Voice Shield web dialer?
A desktop browser with microphone access on the portal's secure origin, a destination on your account to route to, and balance or included minutes, since the call is billed like any other. The feature is in preview and can be switched off per deployment.
Which caller ID does the web dialer send?
By default the phone number saved on your account, which you can change per call. Whether the far end displays it depends on the carriers in the path, as with any call.