Automatic Dialers are software and hardware tools that telemarketers use to make their phone calls.  They want to spend time selling you stuff not calling a number, waiting for someone to pickup, dealing with fax numbers and answering machines.  So they have a machine that does all that stuff for them.  The really insidious ones are called predictive dialers.  They can keep track of how long agents are staying on the line, how many calls are being dropped etc.  Then their dialer software makes calls and sends them to telemarketers sitting idle.  Have you ever picked up the phone, said “hello” and had a 3 second silence?  That’s the autodialer software trying to decide if you’re human then sending it to an agent that is ready.  They don’t know who you are that’s why they have to ask “is this: ?, at such and such an address”.  That’s how automatic dialers waste your, and my time.