Rubble's New AI Calling Law: Are AI phone calls now illegal? Is this regulation the end of the conversational voice AI industry?

February 8th, 2024

Today, the FCC officially announced the passing of a law that AI calls are now considered robocalls, and therefore need to abide by all robocall regulations.

What does this mean for your business and the AI calling/conversational voice AI industry?

Implications:

There are 2 primary implications behind this new law from the FCC.

- Implication #1: You can not call leads that haven’t given you consent to call them with AI

- Implication #2: You can not voice clone someone without their permission.

These changes have resulted in many headlines that “AI calling is now illegal.” And although being aware of the implications of this law is crucial, that headline is an exaggeration and not all AI calling is illegal.

Why the FCC did the right thing:

This was a crucial law that should have been passed as soon as possible. And the FCC deserves credit for how quickly they executed it.

Businesses should not be afraid. The law the FCC passed today is actually great for the future of AI calling and your business individually. This is a major win for Americans, businesses, and the industry as a whole, for 2 reasons:

1. This now stops unwanted AI calls from being made. And anyone who argues this doesn’t want what is best for Americans. No one wants a world where your phone is blowing up with unwanted AI calls all the time, including business owners. And the other benefit of this for business owners is that customers and prospects will now have a better association & more trust with AI calls as a whole.

2. Voice scams will be halted. The amount of people using AI calls for bad reasons is excessive. This technology has the chance to be incredibly valuable, but is tainted by people using AI to impersonate someone's voice/identity and doing unethical things.

The FCC did a great thing here on both of these points.

How does this affect you? What do you need to know?

But as a business that is using or wants to use AI calling, how does this affect you? What do you need to know?

Well, at Rubble, our number one goal is remaining compliant before all else. For this reason, we have been anticipating this law passing for a while.

In fact, since the start of Rubble, we have been fully operating under the assumption that this law had already been passed and was in effect.

As a result, this new regulation doesn’t affect our platform, how we are operating as a company, or the leads you can call with Rubble as a user at all. Not because we are negligent, but because we were already prepared.

Why does this not affect our platform or businesses that currently use Rubble? Well, there are 3 reasons:

1. Outbound calling: For outbound calling, we already require that you are dialing leads that have given you express written consent to receive robocalls from your company.

2. Inbound calling: For inbound calling, the act of calling into a number is a form of consent, and this law does not change anything about how you need to do inbound calling.

3. Voice cloning: We do not allow voice cloning on our platform because we anticipated this could be used for unethical reasons. If we ever implement this in the future, we will have a strict process for verifying that the voice being cloned has given full consent to be cloned. (ID checks, voice recognition, etc)

So if you have been using Rubble, this new law doesn’t affect anything you are doing currently and you can continue using the platform as is. But this is a major win for the industry as a whole – as it ensures long term ethical & healthy use of this technology across the board and builds trust with Americans.

How does this affect you? (If you are new to Rubble or are using an alternative platform)

Now, for those of you that are:

A) New to AI calling

B) Or have been using another platform that has not been operating as if this law was already passed and you now need to pivot how you are doing things based on this new law…

There are 3 things you need to do going forward. (Keep in mind, if you are doing inbound only, this does not apply to you. These are only things that are required to be compliant with regulation for outbound dialing.)

1. For all outbound calls your agent has to say your legal business name (or an official DBA) and clearly state the reason for the call in the introduction. Here’s an example:

Bad intro:

- “Hey, {Name}?”

- “Yeah I was just calling about your request for more information on selling your house. When did you want to sell it by?”

Good intro:

- “Hey, {Name}?”

- “Yeah it’s Jack with Sunshine Realty and I was just calling about your request for more information on selling your house. When did you want to sell it by?”

In the good intro, we included the name of the company that the AI was calling from in the introduction. If your script isn’t set up like this, please update it today. (Again, this only applies to outbound calls, not inbound)

2. Your agent must be able to provide your legal business address, legal business name and a callback number where someone can reach a live human

If a prospect asks the AI agent what your legal business name, address or a callback number is, the agent must be able to provide it accurately.



3. If you are running outbound campaigns, you MUST have the consent of the leads you are calling.

You need to follow all typical robocall regulations.

This means you need to make sure the consumers you are calling have given you explicit consent to contact them using a robocall or artificially generated voice. Cold calling is not allowed at all, unless you are making B2B calls and calling publicly listed business numbers (and zero personal cell phone numbers).

Where do you go from here?

All of that said, If you have any questions, our team is here to support you!

We believe the world has a lot to benefit from this technology and we are here to help companies transition into a world of using AI for sales and customer service everyday. And to do so ethically and compliantly. So please don't hesitate to reach out for help, this is what we do :)