Creating Voice Polls

In order to set up a new automated voice poll with Telerivet, go to your Services page, click Add New Service, click the Voice tab, then click Poll.

Initially, Telerivet will show an example Key Press (multiple-choice) question using a text-to-speech voice:



Replace these placeholders with your actual first question and response options. To play a recorded audio file with the question instead of using a text-to-speech voice, click "Text to speech" then select "Record audio", "Upload audio file", "Link (URL)" or "Recent file".

To add additional options, click "Add another choice".

Response Codes

Each response choice has a section with the label "record as:". This value is called the "response code", which determines how the response is categorized in your poll results and statistics.

Different response options may share the same response code. When Telerivet displays the results of your survey, it will combine all the different forms of yes and no when calculating counts and percentages.

Adding Behavior to Response Choices

The Add action link next to each response choice allows you to configure extra actions to happen when somebody responds with that choice.

Clicking this link opens the Add Action dialog shown below. By default, Telerivet just shows the 5 most common actions for voice polls: playing a text-to-speech message, playing a recorded audio message, skipping to another question, repeating the question, or ending the survey.



If you want to do another action, just click More actions... to see the full list of available actions:

Adding Multiple Questions

If you want your poll to contain more than one question, click Add another question after the last poll question to add a new one. If your poll has multiple questions, Telerivet will ask the next question immediately after receiving the response to the previous one.

Normally, Telerivet asks questions in the order they are shown on the page, from top to bottom. However, you can change the order depending on the response by clicking Add action next to a response choice, and skipping to a different question.

To change the order of questions, just click the up or down arrows on the top right of the question.

Skipping and Repeating Questions

If you have a poll with multiple questions, you can ask different questions depending on the response. Normally Telerivet will automatically ask the next question in the poll, but you can use the "Add action..." link to change that behavior by repeating the current question, skipping to another question, or ending the survey.

In order to skip to another question, add a "Skip to question" action, then select the question ID from the dropdown list.

Question Types

In addition to "Key Press" multiple-choice questions, Telerivet's voice polls may also contain "Multiple Digits" questions and "Recording" questions.

"Multiple Digits" questions are typically used to collect a numeric response, so choices are often used to categorize responses in a numeric range. When a response is received, Telerivet evaluates choices from top to bottom, and the first matching choice will be used to assign a code to the response.


"Recording" questions are used to collect an audio recording. The recording will end when the user presses the "#" key, so it is possible for a poll to contain additional questions after a Recording question. Recordings will show up in your response data table as an audio (MP3) file. Telerivet does not transcribe the recordings.

Poll Settings

At the top of the page, the checkbox "Allow triggering poll via incoming call" allows you to configure whether the poll is triggered when you receive an incoming call. If not checked, the poll will only be triggered if you send it in an outgoing call.

At the bottom, the Poll Settings section lets you configure how your poll works:

Audio when Poll Started / Completed

You can provide a message that will be played before asking the first poll question, as well as a message that will be played when the poll is complete. 

Limiting Number of Responses Per Phone Number

The Multiple Responses setting lets you choose whether to allow each phone number to submit your poll multiple times, or limit contacts to one response each.

Labels and Groups

Telerivet automatically adds a label to each message in the poll, which lets you easily view all messages in that poll on the Messages page. In addition, each contact you send the poll to is automatically added to the Recipients Group, and each contact who responds to the poll is added to the Respondents Group, which are visible on the Contacts page.