The robocall consent rules, in plain English

By MercPrivacy · Published 2026-06-20 · Updated 2026-08-05

Prerecorded and AI voices calling your cell phone need your prior express consent, and marketing needs it in writing. The robocall consent rules, translated into plain English.

The voice on the phone pauses when you interrupt it. It chuckles politely. It uses your first name. And you genuinely cannot tell whether anyone is there.

Here is the good news, and it is better than most people expect: the law does not care how convincing the voice is. The rules for prerecorded and artificial voices calling your cell phone are old, strict, and blunt, and the FCC has already said that AI-generated voices count. What follows is the whole framework in plain English, because it is short enough to actually know.

## The rule in one sentence

If a call to your cell phone uses a prerecorded or artificial voice, the caller needs your prior express consent, and if the call is marketing, that consent must be in writing. No consent, no call. That is the core of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the federal statute everyone shortens to TCPA. The same framework treats text messages as calls, a fact that surprises people and is covered separately in [why replying STOP matters](https://mercprivacy.com/knowledge/unwanted-texts-and-why-stop-matters).

Note what the rule protects: the number, not the job title. A cell phone is a cell phone even when it is the company line, so a business owner taking robocalls on the work cell sits inside these protections too — more on that in [business owners are protected as well](https://mercprivacy.com/knowledge/business-owners-are-protected-too).

## Marketing or informational: the line that decides

The distinction doing the most work in this area is purpose.

- **Informational calls** — the pharmacy's refill reminder, the school closure alert, the airline's gate change. These need prior express consent, which can be as simple as you having given that business your number for that purpose. - **Marketing calls** — anything selling something: warranties, insurance quotes, debt programs, business funding. These need prior express written consent, a signed or affirmatively checked agreement in which you accepted marketing robocalls from that seller.

The practical test when your phone rings: is this a company I deal with, telling me something I need to know, or is someone selling? The moment a prerecorded voice starts selling, the written-consent requirement is in play, and a cold call from a company you have never dealt with almost never has it.

Watch for the hybrid call, because the industry certainly knows about it: a message framed as a courtesy — your warranty file, your account review, your loan status — that turns into a pitch. A sales purpose wrapped in an informational opening is still marketing. The wrapper does not launder it.

## What written consent looks like, and what it does not

Genuine prior express written consent is memorable: a form, a checkbox, an agreement naming the company. When challenged, campaigns tend to point instead at consent language buried in lead-generation forms on websites you may not remember visiting. Whether any given form actually covers a given seller is exactly where these disputes get fought, which is one more reason your notes about what was pitched and by whom carry real weight.

Two points worth keeping either way:

- **Merely having your number is not consent** — a number obtained from a list, a data broker, or the person who had your number before you conveys nothing. The FCC even operates a Reassigned Numbers Database; callers who fail to check it and reach a number's new owner do so at their own risk. - **Consent is revocable, informally** — you may revoke by any reasonable means: saying stop on the call, replying STOP to a text, sending an email. Under current FCC rules the caller must honor a revocation within a reasonable time, capped at ten business days.

> The law does not ask how convincing the robot was. It asks whether you agreed, in writing, to hear from it.

## AI voices are already covered

When voice cloning arrived, there was a brief open question about whether a statute written before smartphones reached synthetic speech. The [FCC](https://www.fcc.gov) answered it: AI-generated voices are artificial voices under the TCPA. A cloned voice, a conversational bot, a synthetic celebrity endorsement — if a live human being is not speaking to you in real time, the call sits inside the prerecorded-and-artificial-voice rules, and everything above applies with full force.

One court case gets cited to claim the TCPA is a dead letter: Facebook v. Duguid, from 2021. It narrowed a different definition, the autodialer. It did not touch the prerecorded and artificial-voice rules, and it did not touch the do-not-call rules. The robot-voice rule is fully alive.

## What a violating call is worth

Each prerecorded or artificial-voice call that breaks these rules carries $500 in statutory damages, up to $1,500 where the violation is willful or knowing. Per call, not per campaign, and you do not need to show you lost money or missed anything. The difference between the two figures turns on willfulness — one more reason your notes about what you said, and when, carry weight. Federal claims generally run on a four-year window, so calls from a while back can still count.

What separates people who can use those numbers from people who cannot is nearly always the record: date, time, the number displayed, what the voice said, and whether you had any relationship with the seller. Keeping that record takes minutes and is laid out in [the evidence file](https://mercprivacy.com/knowledge/the-evidence-file-what-to-keep).

## If the robot already called

Save the voicemail and bring it to us. MercPrivacy evaluates robocall records against exactly these rules and pursues what the record supports — [how it works](https://mercprivacy.com/how-it-works) explains the process, and [Stephanie](https://mercprivacy.com/stephanie) answers instantly and free. Or call (830) 587-5011. We are not a law firm; when a matter requires legal representation, a licensed attorney is engaged.