The OTHER condition can be used in several scenarios. Its purpose is to handle phone responses if they do something "other" than what you have allocated for. It is very much like an ELSE clause of an IF...THEN...ELSE statement in a programming language.
For example, suppose you have the following two actions defined for a prompt:
Figure 1: Handling key press 1 and 2
What if the person on the phone presses the 3 key? Based on the actions above, the 3 key is unhandled and your call campaign will hang up when it encounters an unhandled key press. The following example would handle all key presses:
Figure 2: Handling all key presses
So if the person on the phone pressed the 3 key, the campaign would jump back to the beginning and play My Message.wav. Additionally if the person on the phone did not press any key at all, the call campaign would jump back to My Message.wav as well. No key press at all is considered a response and would be something "other" than 1 or 2, the defined actions.
You might have also noticed that VoiceShot offers a NO RESPONSE key press option. In general, you can use OTHER in place of NO RESPONSE, unless you want one action when the person on the phone does not enter any key presses and another action if they enter a key press other than ones for which you have actions defined.
In an IVR API application, you can also use OTHER as the default key press handler:
Figure 3: Handling key presses with API, else with campaign
For the above example, your application you would have code similar to:
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If your application did not send back any XML or sent back a GOTO Call Command to a promptid that did not exist, the OTHER action in your call campaign would handle this case.
One last example:
Figure 4: Handling key presses with campaign and API
In this example, key presses 1 and 2 are handled by the campaign. If you always want Yes.wav to play when key 1 is pressed, and always want No.wav to play when key 2 is pressed, there is no sense programming this into your code. Save time and program it directly into the campaign.
In the above example, your application would handle another set of keypresses (say key 3 and key 4) through the API, and OTHER would handle everything else.