Multilingual Voicemail and Answering Machine Detection via Pretrained Audio Embeddings and Gradient Boosting Machines
Abstract: Answering machine detection (AMD) is a fundamental task in telephony that classifies whether an answered call is picked up by a human or a voicemail (machine). Despite its widespread use across cloud communication platforms, existing approaches rely on proprietary systems with undisclosed architectures, or require computationally expensive models that cannot operate in real time. We propose a lightweight AMD system that combines pretrained audio embeddings with gradient boosting machines, trained to prioritize the correct detection of human-answered calls. We evaluate seven models across two datasets: three models that we propose, a proprietary industry model, two prior academic approaches, and a large language model baseline that relies on automatic speech recognition. Furthermore, we release OpenAMD, the first publicly available AMD dataset comprising of more than 500 recordings in 7 languages. Our best model achieves the highest precision across both datasets while maintaining low inference latency. We assess the robustness of models to additive noise and packet loss, and perform tests of statistical significance to discover per-language and per-gender model performance. Finally, we evaluate our model on an out-of-domain task of detecting robocalls, where it achieves 94.34% recall without any additional training, which is comparable to the industry standard.