I'm trying to figure something out - we are using VAPI as an ai voicemail assistant. If we decide the caller is a real human and we are going to take a voicemail, we prompt with "kevin is currently unavailable. please leave your voice mail for kevin now." - well we have had multiple people come back and say "there was no beep" or "I didn't know when to start talking" - two questions: 1. is there a tts figure or unicode or something that would make a digital beep sound? 2. is there a way we can upload a customs audio file that would play as the beep before we start recording? Really just looking for a solution here to what I think is a simple problem.

You can upload a custom beep audio file (e.g.,

.mp3

or

.wav

) and configure your VAPI voicemail assistant to play it before recording. Just provide the URL to your beep audio in the tool configuration like this:

json
{
  "messages": [
    {
      "type": "request-start",
      "content": "https://yourdomain.com/beep.mp3"
    }
  ]
}

This ensures callers hear a clear beep before leaving their message. For more details, see the [VAPI voicemail tool documentation](https://docs.vapi.ai/tools/voicemail-tool). Source: - [Voicemail Tool Documentation](https://docs.vapi.ai/tools/voicemail-tool)

does that work for vape cloud?

Thanks for your question! The documentation confirms you can upload a custom beep audio file for the Vapi voicemail tool, but there is no mention of a product or feature called "vape cloud." Could you clarify what you mean by "vape cloud"? Are you referring to a specific Vapi feature, a third-party integration, or something else? This will help me provide a more accurate answer. Source: - [Voicemail Tool Documentation](https://docs.vapi.ai/tools/voicemail-tool)

I don’t believe you’re looking for a voicemail tool. A voicemail tool is typically used for leaving a voicemail message, whereas your use case seems to involve playing a beep sound in an inbound call where the agent is acting as a voicemail capture. At the moment, there isn’t a TTS tool that supports playing a beep sound. There may be some support for this in Azure, but I’m not certain. As a workaround, I’d recommend using a spoken prompt such as “Please speak now” or “Speak after this message.”

I can see that there is a way to provide a link to a public audio file to use as the

firstMessage

for the assistant, so I assume that a full default voicemail greeting along with a "beep" could be used for this first message? https://docs.vapi.ai/api-reference/webhooks/server-message#response.body.messageResponse.AssistantRequest.assistant.firstMessage It sounds like it wouldn't be possible to first read a TTS message as the first message, and then play a "beep" sound after that concludes though?

Yeah, you can configure that beep as the first message. What you can do is maybe try to create a squad, a dedicated assistant to catch the recording, with the first message as a beep, and configured to end the call after receiving a message. Just ask in a prompt to transfer the call after saying that message.

just to be clear, with the squad it would look like: * first assistant to read a TTS message then immediately transfer to another assistant * second assistant to play the "beep" as the first message, then wait to collect the voicemail message * second assistant also optionally configured to end the call once the message is collected (the caller has stopped talking) is that what you're describing?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m describing. It’s just a recommendation that I believe could work, not an official approach, and I haven’t tried it myself. You can give it a try to see if it works; it’s the closest method I can think of to replicate the beep.

perfect, thank you so much for your help! I'll report back here if that approach ends up working

Vape cloud 😎

we pushed the squads approach for the voicemail greeting (+ beep) last week and it all appears to be working! Thank you all for the help!

That's great!