Smart Numbers Overview

Vonage Business Communications Smart Numbers enable you to:

• Forward a Vonage Business Communications call to a Vonage API Platform Voice API application
• Connect calls to a Vonage Business Communications extension from a Voice API NCCO

What can you do with it?

You can use all the power and flexibility of the Vonage API Platform Voice API together with the supporting Vonage Business Communications Provisioning API to create fully customized call experiences for your customers, including:

• Interactive voice response (IVR) systems that link to your CRM system to personalize the menu options to your customers' needs
• Voicebots that use natural language processing and/or AI to answer simple questions spoken by your customers
• Automatic proxying of local numbers based on the area code dialed
• Voice broadcasts to alert customers to important news or events
• Real-time sentiment analysis to gauge the "mood" of a call
• Calendar integration to check the free/busy status of a call recipient and react accordingly

Getting Started

To use Smart Numbers, you need:

• A Vonage Business Communications account
• A Vonage API Platform account

Next, you must:

1. Enable the Smart Number add-on - To add the capability to your Vonage Business Communications account
2. Create a Vonage API Platform Voice API Application - To store security and configuration information
3. Provision Smart Numbers - Configure one or more Vonage Business Communications numbers as Smart Numbers and link those numbers to your Vonage API Platform Voice API Application

Using Smart Numbers

You will use the Vonage API Platform Voice API to build interactive and customized call experiences for your users. Vonage provides client libraries in various languages that make it easier to work with the Voice API.

To forward an inbound call on one of your linked Vonage Business Communications numbers to your Vonage API Platform Voice API Application, you create a webhook endpoint in your code and configure the URL in your Vonage API Platform account. This is so that Vonage API Platform's APIs can alert your application when a call is received and ask for instructions on how to process the call.

You provide these instructions in the form of a Vonage API Platform Call Control Object (NCCO) that defines the list of actions that the call must perform, such as reading a message to your caller using text-to-speech, or collecting input as part of an interactive voice response (IVR) system. You can also use a connect action in the NCCO to route the call to a Vonage Business Communications extension.

You can use the Vonage Business Communications APIs in your application to retrieve information about your Vonage Business Communications accounts, extensions and users.