An Associated Press story published today reported on problems with an election-related voice broadcast campaign, conducted yesterday and today, in Pinellas County, Florida. Dinesh Ravishanker, CEO of CallFire (www.callfire.com), the company that created the technology, issued the following statement:

“A user from the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections created a voice broadcast campaign on Monday, Nov. 5, which appears to have been intended to remind people of the deadline to turn in their absentee ballots. The recorded message said ‘… you have until tomorrow at 7p.m….’ The user started the campaign at 4:30 p.m. on Monday and it ran until 8 p.m. At 8:30 a.m. today, Tuesday, Nov. 6, he restarted the same campaign but without updating the recorded message. Accordingly, people who received the message today, Tuesday, heard: ‘…you have until tomorrow at 7 p.m.,’ which implies Wednesday.

“To be absolutely clear: there was no technical glitch with the CallFire system. There was no ‘queue.’ The user in question manually started and stopped the campaign on both days. It is the user’s responsibility to manage all recorded messages.”

About CallFire

CallFire (callfire.com) simplifies telephony, making sophisticated, expensive carrier class telecom capabilities available through an affordable, easy-to-use GUI and API platform. Any business, from start-up to enterprise, can reach its customers on any device, using text messaging or voice, with CallFire’s massively scalable, cloud telecom platform. CallFire products include Voice APIs, Business Text Messaging, Voice Broadcast, Local Phone Numbers, Call Tracking, IVR, Power Dialing for agents and more. Call analytics enable CallFire’s 50,000 users to reach customers more often using text marketing, virtual numbers, auto dialers and mobile messaging.