Twilio & Microsoft form partnership to advance conversational AI tools
Twilio, the customer engagement platform, has announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft aimed at accelerating the adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The announcement was made at Twilio SIGNAL, the company’s annual developer conference.
The collaboration seeks to provide Twilio developers and Microsoft-managed customers with tools to build conversational AI applications. The company's expereince in communications, data, and AI will be combined with Microsoft Azure AI’s, enterprise-grade infrastructure to support wider enterprise adoption.
Conversational AI uses natural language processing and machine learning to enable systems to understand and respond to human voice and text inputs in a natural manner. However, businesses have faced challenges such as data limitations and integration issues with legacy systems, hampering large-scale deployments.
“Every interaction between a business and their customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and those interactions have been drastically improved by AI,” said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio. “Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers.”
The partnership will focus on developing conversational AI services, including multi-channel AI agents for automating customer engagement, AI agents assisting live contact centre staff through enhanced Twilio Agent Copilot features, and multi-modal solutions to improve digital business-customer interactions.
“Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI including AI agents across their organization with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance,” said Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. “Customers will see strong business value with the combination of Azure AI Foundry and Twilio’s communications and data capabilities – the critical last mile connection between businesses and customers.”
At the event, the company also announced enhancements to its conversational AI offerings. These include ConversationRelay, now generally available, which allows developers to build advanced natural voice AI agents using their choice of large language models. The ocmpnay has integrated real-time streaming, speech recognition, interruption handling, and human-like voice features into the capability.
Additionally, Conversational Intelligence, an expansion of Twilio’s Voice Intelligence platform, has launched for voice and is in private beta for messaging. This tool analyses voice and text conversations to generate structured data and insights intended to improve customer experience and operational efficiency at scale.
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