Abstract
This publication discloses, in enabling detail, a pre-answer entitlement gate for telephone lines that are answered by an autonomous AI agent (an AI "receptionist" or voice bot) and billed on a metered subscription. The distinguishing constraint is architectural: the platform runs on top of a Communications-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) provider that emits its usage/charging signal only when the call completes. There is no mid-call credit-control channel available at the CPaaS layer — the platform cannot ask the carrier to reserve, decrement, or terminate a call against a balance while the call is live, the way a telecom Online Charging System (OCS) can. That deferral creates a window in which an adversary or a runaway integration could accrue substantial unbilled service by launching many concurrent calls, or a few very long calls, all before a single metering event fires. The mechanism closes that window with three cooperating ideas. First, a single entitlement lookup keyed on the dialed number runs before the AI answers, so a call that is not entitled is declined with a spoken announcement rather than being answered and charged retroactively. Second, because usage is metered only at call end, the point-in-time entitlement check is reinforced by a tri-layer static control — an absolute-metered trial cap, a live-call-detail-record (CDR) concurrency cap that counts the current call's own row, and a per-call duration/turn ceiling enforced by the answering session — which together prove that in-flight exposure can never exceed concurrencycap × percallceiling until the next metering event. Third, entitlement-check errors resolve through a failure-semantics matrix keyed to subscription shape: fail-open (audited) only for a paying, active, non-trialing subscription; always fail-closed for a trialing subscription; fail-closed for any non-active shape; and pass-through on a binding-lookup error for co-tenant isolation. A metering ingest busts the entitlement cache, so consecutive calls read fresh usage instead of a stale snapshot. This document is published to establish dated, public, enabling prior art over the mechanism and its combination.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Assuncao, gustavo matthew, "Pre-Answer Entitlement Gate for AI-Answered Phone Lines with Subscription-Shape-Differentiated Fail Policy and Metering-Lag Reinforcement", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/10884