Quickstart

Boltun makes real phone calls for you. You describe what you sell, it writes the agent, and it works through your list — talking, handling objections, and handing you a transcript and an outcome for every call. Here is the whole thing, end to end.

How it works

Four things make up everything you will touch in the app.

When a campaign is running, the dialer picks the next lead that is due, checks it is a sensible hour where that person lives, places the call, and writes the result back. It keeps several calls going at once and stops on its own when the list is finished, when you pause it, or when your balance runs out.

Around the app

The left sidebar is the whole app.

Open a campaign and you get five tabs across the top — Design, Test calls, Leads, Calls and Settings — plus Start dialer, Pause and Reset in the top-right corner.

Design a pitch

The Design tab is a chat with Robert, the agent designer. Tell it who you are calling and what you are offering, in plain words. It drafts the opener, the answers to the objections you will actually hear, and the close — then turns that into the instructions your caller follows. You never have to write those instructions yourself, but you can read and edit them at any time.

Robert keeps the context of the campaign, so you can come back later — “be warmer at the start”, “stop offering a discount” — and it reworks the pitch instead of starting over.

Test calls

Before you spend anything on a real list, hear it. The Test calls tab lets you talk to your own agent two ways:

The transcript appears as you speak, and each turn shows how long the agent took to hear you, think, and answer — so if a reply feels slow, you can see which part caused it. You can also type instead of talking, which is quicker when you are only checking wording.

Leads & import

Add people one at a time with Add lead, or bring a list in with Import CSV. On import you are shown how your columns were matched before anything is saved, and any rows that could not be read are listed back to you rather than dropped silently.

# a CSV that imports cleanly
phone,first_name,surname,timezone,notes
+14845550107,Jordan,Ellis,America/New_York,renewed last spring
+442071838750,Priya,Shah,,asked to be called after 6pm

Only the phone number is required. Leave timezone out and Boltun works it out from the number itself — see Scheduling & timezones. Anything you put in Notes is given to the agent before it dials, so it can open with something specific to that person.

In the leads table you can search by name, phone or company, filter by status — Pending, Calling, Completed, Failed — and select rows to add them to a campaign. Click any lead to open their card: details, call history, and the notes the agent will see. You can also change a lead for one campaign only; when you do, a Revert to master link appears so you can put the original details back.

Calls & transcripts

The Calls tab is the record of everything that happened. Calls in progress appear at the top with a live badge and their transcript streaming in; finished calls keep the full transcript, the recording, how long they lasted and how they ended.

Every completed call is also read back automatically, which writes a short summary and marks the outcome — interested, not interested, wrong person, no answer, and so on — so you can skim a hundred calls without listening to any of them.

Each row shows which way the call went: ↗ OUT for one you made, ↙ IN for one that came to you. See When they call back.

When they call back

People miss calls, and a good number of them ring back. Boltun answers. It looks up the last call you made to that person from the number they dialled, and picks the conversation up with the same agent — same instructions, same voice, same engine, same settings as the call they missed.

The agent is also told why they are probably calling. Someone returning a call that never connected is greeted differently from someone who spoke to you yesterday and has a follow-up question — it knows which of the two it is before it says hello.

The call lands in the same campaign as the one that reached out, marked ↙ IN instead of ↗ OUT, with the transcript, recording and summary you get from any other call. Inbound calls never count toward auto-refinement — that measures how your pitch performs when you make the call.

Someone you have never called. Every number you own gets its own campaign, named INBOUND +1…, created for you the moment the number is assigned. That is what answers strangers on that line. Give each one its own instructions and a caller who found your Berlin number gets a different greeting from one who rang your New York number. These campaigns are tied to their line, so they cannot be renamed, deleted, or pointed at a different number.

Answering is off for a line the moment any one of three switches is off: the workspace switch your administrator controls, the Answer inbound calls switch on your Settings page, and the one on each campaign’s Settings tab. When a call is turned away the reason is written into the call log, so you can see it happened and why.

One requirement: the number has to be yours alone. A number shared between accounts is tagged SHARED under My numbers and cannot answer, because there is no way to tell whose agent should pick up. Ask your administrator for a dedicated caller ID if the switch is greyed out.

Scheduling & timezones

Set the hours you are willing to call in and Boltun will not dial outside them. You choose a start time, an optional end time (leave it empty to run until midnight), and which days of the week are allowed. Turn scheduling off entirely and it calls whenever the dialer is running.

The part that matters is whose clock those hours follow:

How the contact’s timezone is worked out. Boltun takes the first answer it can get, in this order:

You can always see and change what was detected: open the lead and the timezone field shows what Boltun is using. All 448 standard timezones are available, and the field is searchable.

Calling regions

A phone conversation only feels natural if the reply comes back fast. To keep that true wherever you are calling, Boltun runs your agent from four places around the world and uses the one closest to the person being dialled:

The choice is automatic, and it uses the same timezone Boltun worked out for scheduling — so a lead in New York is handled from Ashburn and one in Berlin from Frankfurt. The audio takes a shorter path and the pause before each reply gets noticeably smaller. There is nothing to set up: import a list from anywhere and each call routes itself. If a number cannot be placed at all, the call is handled from Frankfurt.

Auto-refinement

Your first pitch is rarely your best one. Boltun can pause a campaign automatically after a set number of completed calls, read those transcripts, and come back with concrete changes — the opener people hang up on, the objection that keeps landing, the phrasing that works.

Set it on the campaign’s Settings tab: how many calls to review after (10 by default, 0 turns it off). Once the changes are accepted, the campaign carries on where it left off.

Approvals

If you would rather nothing changed behind your back, turn on approvals. Any change to how your agent talks then waits for you: a badge appears on the campaign, you see exactly what would change — the old wording next to the new — and nothing takes effect until you approve it. Approve and the campaign resumes on its own; reject and it keeps the pitch you already had.

Speaking style

Pick the voice on the campaign’s Settings tab — you can hear every one of them first on the Voices page, filtered by language, gender and character.

Beyond which voice, you can direct how it speaks in a sentence or two: “warm and unhurried, smile in the voice”, or “brisk and factual, no small talk”. Voices differ in how much direction they take, so change it, run a test call, and listen — it is the fastest loop in the product.

Sign in & security

Create an account with your work email and a password of at least eight characters containing a letter and a number. Boltun emails you a six-digit code to confirm the address, then asks for your company and team size — and you are in.

Forgotten passwords are reset from the sign-in screen: enter your email, take the code from your inbox, choose a new one. Keep me signed in holds the session for a month instead of a day.

Your Account page — under your name, top-right — is where you change your name, email or password, and where you switch on two-factor sign-in. With it on, signing in asks for a fresh code from your inbox as well as your password. Changing your email needs a code sent to the new address, so a stray session cannot quietly move your account somewhere else.

Balance & billing

Boltun is prepaid: you hold a balance and calls draw it down by the minute while they are in progress. No invoice at the end of the month, no seat fee. The Usage page shows what you have left, roughly how many minutes that buys at your current rate, and where it went — broken down by voice engine and by campaign.

You top up your own balance on the Billing page — reach it from the Top up button on your balance or the Billing link in the sidebar. Every movement — top-ups, call spend, adjustments — is listed with a date and a reason, so the balance always adds up. Per-minute rates for each voice engine are on the Pricing page.

Adding funds. Pick one of the ready-made amounts — $10, $25, $50 or $100 — or type your own, anywhere from $5 to $500. A secure payment box opens right on the page; nothing is charged until you confirm, and your new balance shows the moment the payment clears. If your workspace has not turned payments on you will not see these controls, and your administrator tops the account up for you instead.

How you can pay. Any Visa, Mastercard or American Express card works, and so do Link, Apple Pay and Google Pay where your device offers them — the wallet buttons appear on their own, so on a phone you can top up with a fingerprint and never type a card number. Boltun never sees or stores the card itself; the payment provider holds it and hands back only the brand and last four digits, which is all the page ever shows.

Automatic top-up. So a campaign never stalls for want of credit, you can let Boltun refill the balance for you. You set two amounts and pick one saved card: a threshold to watch for and a top-up amount to add. It starts switched off, and nothing is ever charged automatically until you turn it on yourself.

Once it is on, this is the whole of when it charges — there is no other trigger:

Turning it off. Switch automatic top-up off with the same toggle on the Billing page whenever you like; it takes effect at once and no further automatic charge can happen. It also needs a saved card to run, so removing the card it uses stops it just as surely.

Removing a card. Every card or wallet you have used is listed on the Billing page with its brand and last four digits. Remove next to one forgets it for good, and you will be asked for payment details afresh next time you top up. If you remove the card automatic top-up relies on, automatic top-up simply pauses until you point it at another.

Settings

There are two layers. Settings in the sidebar holds the defaults every new campaign starts from — voice engine, calling hours, whose timezone to use, when to auto-refine. A campaign’s own Settings tab overrides them for that campaign alone; leave a field untouched and it keeps following the default, so changing it once changes it everywhere.

Workspace defaults are edited by administrators. If you do not see them, you will still find My numbers there — the caller IDs assigned to your account, which is what your leads see when the phone rings. A number shared with another account is tagged SHARED. The Answer inbound calls switch below the list controls whether your numbers pick up when someone rings them; see When they call back.

One field does not inherit: a campaign’s system prompt. Calls to real numbers will not start until you have written one, so a half-configured campaign can never dial a customer with a generic assistant. Test calls from the browser are exempt. A campaign’s Outbound Number is also its own: leave it on Automatic and Boltun picks the caller ID closest to each contact, or pin one of your numbers to use it for every call in that campaign.