Compliance
What the FCC’s February 2024 ruling means for your AI voice campaigns — and how Bellhook stays inside the lines.
A sloppy AI voice rollout can snowball into six-figure liability fast. The good news: the rules are clear, Bellhook enforces them by default, and every workflow we ship treats compliance as a design constraint — not a checkbox.
Jump to the ruling →The 2024 ruling
What the FCC changed in February 2024.
The FCC’s February 2024 ruling brought AI generated voice under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Practically, a call using an AI generated or cloned voice counts as prerecorded voice, which means the protections consumers have had against junk prerecorded calls for decades now apply to AI voice too — including the requirement to get prior express written consent before placing the call.
What Bellhook does operationally
Bellhook treats every AI voice call as prerecorded voice from day one. No outbound AI call or AI assisted SMS is sent before written consent is recorded for that contact.
Prior express written consent
Written consent is collected before any AI voice or SMS fires.
Prior express written consent is a clear-and-conspicuous written agreement from the contact authorizing the seller to deliver telemarketing messages — including AI voice calls and marketing texts — using an autodialer or prerecorded voice. It must be captured before the call, it must identify the seller, and the proof must be kept on file.
What Bellhook does operationally
Consent is captured at intake, name-matched to the contact, time-stamped, and stored against the record. The proof is auditable per contact and exportable on request.
Opt-out handling
STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, and “take me off your list” are honored instantly.
A consumer can revoke consent at any time and through any reasonable means — a reply of STOP, the word UNSUBSCRIBE, a verbal “take me off your list,” an email reply, or a request mid-call. Once heard, that opt-out covers the seller across every channel, not just the one the consumer used to ask. Responding to a STOP request with another solicitation is by itself a violation.
What Bellhook does operationally
Bellhook routes STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, and “take me off” through a single suppression list per deployment. The flag writes once and is honored across SMS, email, and voice — regardless of the channel the consumer used.
Calling windows
No calls before 8am or after 9pm in the contact’s local time.
The TCPA restricts telemarketing calls to 8am–9pm in the called party’s local time. State rules layer on top — Florida, Oklahoma, Washington, and several others tighten the window further. Local service operators sometimes assume evening callbacks are a feature, but a 10pm call to a residential customer is a real liability.
What Bellhook does operationally
Calling windows are enforced server-side, in the Make/Zapier step that hands a contact to the dialer. The default is 8am–9pm in the recipient’s local time, with a per-vertical and per-state override available.
DNC scrubbing
The National Do-Not-Call Registry is checked before every send.
Opt-out handling is reactive — it kicks in when a consumer says stop. The DNC scrub is proactive: before a contact is added to a campaign, their phone number is checked against the National Do-Not-Call Registry, internal suppression lists, and any state-level registry that applies. Skipping the scrub is one of the most common ways small operators end up on the wrong side of a consent order.
What Bellhook does operationally
Bellhook scrubs new and recurring sends against the DNC registry, the deployment suppression list, and any state-specific list you operate in. Scrubs run before the dialer step, every time, not just at launch.
Audit trail
Every consent, message, and timing decision is logged.
When a regulator or a consumer asks, the operator needs to be able to produce the consent record, the message log, the timestamp of every send, and the proof that the call landed inside the calling window. Without those, even a fully-compliant deployment is hard to defend. Operators should treat audit data as a first-class deliverable — not a database afterthought.
What Bellhook does operationally
Bellhook logs consent capture, opt-out events, send attempts, send completions, and the local-time decision at the moment of every send. Exports are available on demand for compliance reviews or regulator inquiries.
Common questions
The questions local operators ask before turning AI voice on.
Next step
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