Twilio partners with Microsoft to accelerate conversational AI initiatives

Customer engagement platform, Twilio has announced a multi year strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The collaboration unlocks potential for more than 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft managed customers to build the future of conversational AI and helps deliver on Twilio’s vision: ensuring that every digital interaction between businesses and consumers is amazing. Conversational AI enables computer systems to understand and respond to human conversations in a way that mimics natural dialogue. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyze and interpret human voice and text input, delivering appropriate responses through AI-generated voice or text.

Twilio’s expertise and leadership across communications, data, and AI, combined with Microsoft Azure AI’s safe, secure, enterprise-grade, and global infrastructure uniquely help accelerate conversational AI adoption across the enterprise.

“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 two companies will collaborate on developing conversational AI customer engagement solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio’s comprehensive customer engagement platform that combines communications, contextual data, and AI. Product innovation areas of focus for the strategic partnership will consist of a broad range of conversational AI services, including:

●      Capabilities for building multi-channel AI agents for automating and dramatically improving every customer engagement;

●      AI agents that assist live agents in the contact center via enhanced Twilio Agent Copilot capabilities; and

●      Multi-modal solutions for enhancing and improving digital interactions between businesses and customers.

“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.”

Conversational AI at Twilio

Twilio’s Conversational AI solutions provide model flexibility, streamlined options for businesses to augment capabilities at their own speed, and native integrations to the leading Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) to drive more efficient and engaging customer interactions.

In addition to the strategic partnership with Microsoft, Twilio announced numerous conversational AI enhancements and innovations today at Twilio SIGNAL for businesses exploring conversational AI solutions for customer care and sales.

Notable innovations include:

●      ConversationRelay (General Availability): A conversational AI capability that enables developers to create robust natural voice AI agents using their choice of LLM. Twilio seamlessly integrates real-time streaming, the latest speech recognition technology, interruption handling, and expressive, human-like voices, allowing developers to create advanced agentic applications more quickly, and 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 improve customer experiences and operational efficiency, at scale.