Overview
Known Contacts lets your agent recognize people who call you. You upload a directory of contacts for your organization, and when one of those numbers calls, Tala gives the agent that contact’s details (name, type, and any extra information you provided). The agent greets the caller by name and skips the usual identification questions. If the number is not in your directory, nothing changes: the agent behaves exactly as it does today. This is useful when you already know most of your callers, for example tenants, patients, clients, or suppliers.How It Works
- A call comes in to one of your numbers.
- Tala looks up the caller’s number in your organization’s directory, using an exact match on the phone number.
- If it matches, the contact’s details are added to the agent automatically for that call. The agent greets the person by name and does not ask them to identify themselves again, unless the caller says the information is wrong.
- If it does not match, the call proceeds normally.
Setting Up Your Directory
Open Known Contacts in the sidebar, under Settings. You can add contacts one at a time, or import a CSV file.Add a contact manually
Fill in the phone number and, optionally, a name, a contact type, and an internal reference, then click Add contact.Import a CSV file
Open Import CSV file, choose your file, and import. The file is validated before anything is saved: if a single row is invalid, nothing is imported, so you can fix the file and try again. Only thephone column is required. Everything else is optional.
Any other columns you include (for example
email or address) are kept and attached to the contact, so you can import your existing file without reformatting it.
Re-importing a number updates that contact; the rest of your directory is left untouched.
Example:
Managing Your Directory
Imported contacts appear in the Imported directory table. To remove contacts:- Delete a single contact with the action on its row.
- Select several contacts with the checkboxes, then click Delete selection to remove them all at once. The checkbox in the table header selects everything.
Privacy
Known Contacts is scoped to your organization. Other organizations cannot see or use your contacts. During a call, the agent only receives the contact that matches the caller’s number. It never has access to the rest of your directory and cannot look someone up by name, so one caller’s information is never exposed to another. Deleting a contact removes it from your directory.Personalizing the Greeting Further
Recognized callers are greeted by name automatically. If you want to use a contact’s details elsewhere in the conversation, the AI assistant in the workflow editor can do it for you: ask it something like “greet known callers by name”. It inserts variables that are filled in at call time:{{ known_contact_display_name }}is the contact’s name.{{ known_contact_profile_type }}is the type you gave the contact.{{ known_contact_identified }}is true when the caller was recognized, which is handy in a condition:{{ #if known_contact_identified }}Hello {{ known_contact_display_name }}{{ /if }}.