A Twilio, the customer engagement platform driving real-time personalized experiences for today's leading brands, announced at the San Francisco edition of Twilio SIGNAL, a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate the adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The collaboration unlocks the potential of over 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft-managed customers to build the future of conversational AI, while helping realize Twilio's vision: ensuring every digital interaction between businesses and consumers is exceptional.
Conversational AI enables computational systems to understand and respond to human conversations in a way that mimics natural dialogue. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyze and interpret human voice and text input, delivering appropriate responses through AI-generated voice or text.
Companies building conversational AI experiences for customer engagement have faced a series of challenges – from lack of accuracy due to incomplete data to scaling difficulties, and moving successful pilot programs to production due to legacy system integration challenges and lack of robust data infrastructure. Twilio's expertise and leadership in communications, data, and AI, combined with Microsoft Azure AI's secure, enterprise-grade global infrastructure, help accelerate enterprise-wide conversational AI adoption.
“Every interaction between a business and its customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and these interactions have been dramatically enhanced by AI,” said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio. “Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering accuracy for our customers and rich, dynamic experiences for their consumers.”
The two companies will collaborate on developing conversational AI customer engagement solutions based on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's comprehensive customer engagement platform, which combines communications, contextual data, and AI. The product innovation focus areas for the strategic partnership will consist of a broad range of conversational AI services, including:
- Capabilities for building multi-channel AI agents to automate and dramatically enhance each customer's engagement;
- AI agents that assist human agents in the contact center through enhanced Twilio Agent Copilot capabilities;
- Multimodal solutions to elevate and enhance digital interactions between businesses and customers.
“Azure AI Foundry enables customers to scale AI with confidence, including deploying AI agents organization-wide, with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, enhance transparency, and simplify compliance,” said Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President of Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. “Customers will realize strong business value from combining Azure AI Foundry with Twilio's communication and data capabilities – the crucial last-mile connection between businesses and customers.”
Conversational AI at Twilio
Twilio's conversational AI solutions offer model flexibility, simplified options for businesses to enhance capabilities at their own pace, and native integrations with leading Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to drive more efficient and engaging customer interactions.
Beyond the strategic partnership with Microsoft, Twilio announces several enhancements and innovations in conversational AI for businesses exploring conversational AI solutions for customer service and sales.
These innovations include:
- ConversationRelay (general availability): a conversational AI feature that enables developers to build robust, natural voice AI agents using the LLM of their choice. Twilio seamlessly integrates real-time streaming, the latest speech recognition technology, interruption handling, and expressive, human-like voices, allowing developers to build advanced agent applications faster with less overhead;
- Conversational Intelligence (general availability for voice and private beta for messaging): an expansion of Twilio's Voice Intelligence, Conversational Intelligence analyzes voice calls and text-based conversations, converting them into structured data and insights that enhance customer experience and operational efficiency at scale.
