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How to call 100 businesses at once with an AI agent

#agents #ai #api #automation

Sometimes you need the same question answered by a lot of businesses: does each store on your list carry the product, which of 100 venues has a room free on the 14th, are these clinics taking new patients. Calling them yourself takes days. You can hand it to an AI in three ways.

1. No code: a spreadsheet in, one row per call out

PlaceCall on the Apify Store takes a list (a CSV upload, a Google Sheet, pasted rows, or another Apify dataset such as Google Maps results), calls every business on it, asks your questions and returns one row per call.

Start with Check my list, don't call ticked. You'll see what each business would be asked, for free. When it looks right, accept the PlaceCall terms, untick it and run again.

Pricing there is $0.10 per call that reaches a real conversation. Unanswered calls, voicemail and busy lines are free, and the first 10 calls on each Apify account are free too.

2. An agent with a list

With the PlaceCall plugin in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, or the connector in claude.ai and ChatGPT, give the agent your list and the question:

Call each business in stores.csv and ask whether they have the Model X in stock and the price. Put the answers in a new column.

The agent places one call per business with the place_call tool, collects each result with get_call_result, and builds the table. If a business asks something the agent can't answer, it comes back to you mid-call.

3. Your own code

Loop over your list and POST /calls for each row, with a unique Idempotency-Key per row so a retry never dials twice:

curl -s -X POST https://api.voygr.tech/calls \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PLACECALL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: stores-row-17" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"target_phone": "+1XXXXXXXXXX", "brief": "Ask whether they have the Model X in stock today and the price. Do not order anything.", "language": "en"}'
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Each call is queued and returns a call_id. Poll GET /calls/{call_id} until it's completed, failed or cancelled, then read result and outcome_summary. Wait for transcript_status to read final if you need the full transcript.

A call that gets something costs 10 credits. A call that gets nothing is free, and no answer, voicemail and hang-ups don't count. The first 250 calls are free.

What to expect

When PlaceCall spoke with 848 San Francisco businesses in our SF Tech Week experiment, saying it was an AI on every call, about 1 in 3 kept talking. Vets were the most open at 79%. Keep the question short and specific, and plan for a share of hang-ups in any big list.

Calls go to US numbers only, and not to businesses in Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana or Nebraska.

Source and docs: github.com/voygr-tech/placecall.

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