Introducing Conversational Intelligence: Unlock unified AI understanding across Voice, Messaging & Virtual Agents

Introducing Conversational Intelligence

As Conversational AI evolves from experimentation to enterprise strategy, businesses are entering a new era of customer engagement—one that blends AI, data, and omnichannel communication into a unified, intelligent experience. We’re giving organizations the power to automate, personalize, and optimize every interaction across channels and at scale.

At this year’s SIGNAL San Francisco, we unveiled the next milestone in that strategy: Conversational Intelligence. Formerly known as Voice Intelligence, Conversational Intelligence now reflects the full scope of modern engagement—extending beyond voice to include messaging, chat, and AI-powered virtual agents. The goal is simple: help businesses understand and act on the value found in every customer conversation, no matter where it takes place.

Because today’s customers don’t just call your business—they text, they chat, they message, and they engage with AI agents. And every one of those conversations is an opportunity to build loyalty, resolve issues, and move relationships forward. But most companies still analyze these touchpoints in silos. A customer texts about a return, then calls two days later—only to be asked to repeat the issue. Or an AI agent repeatedly escalates to a human, but no one knows why. These blind spots erode trust, slow resolution, and cost businesses time and money.

Conversational Intelligence breaks down these silos. By unifying conversational data across voice, messaging, and AI agents, it gives businesses a true, cross-channel view of the customer journey—fueling smarter automation, faster resolution, and more connected experiences:

• Contact center agents can pick up exactly where the last conversation with a customer left off, with full context across channels.
• Sales reps can use critical indicators of lead quality from every interaction to prioritize their outreach, automate best next steps, and ultimately close more business.
• CX teams can measure the effectiveness of engagement strategies, uncover patterns, and tie interactions directly to outcomes.
• Product teams can diagnose where AI agents struggle and optimize behavior—reducing escalations and improving satisfaction.

This is exactly how companies like Fastcall are putting Conversational Intelligence to work—embedding insights into customer interactions to unlock new value inside their existing tech stack:

Fastcall’s approach shows how easily integrating Conversational Intelligence not only can deliver better experiences—it also drives continuous improvement and measurable impact

What’s new with Conversational Intelligence?

Conversational Intelligence empowers businesses to unlock unified AI understanding across Voice, Messaging, and Virtual Agents. Building on the foundation of Voice Intelligence’s AI-powered transcription and language analysis capabilities, Conversational Intelligence introduces powerful new features designed for today’s cross-channel engagement landscape:

🤖 AI Agent Observability with ConversationRelay (Available Now)

A native integration with ConversationRelay empowers you to monitor and refine interactions between customers and Twilio-powered AI agents to ensure quality and fine-tune performance over time.

✨ Generative Custom Operators (Available Now)

LLM-powered custom operators let you easily define use cases like quality assurance checks, compliance flagging, or competitive insights — tailored to your business — all with just a few simple instructions.

💬 Conversational Intelligence for Messaging ( Request Access )

Gain full visibility into customer interactions across SMS, WhatsApp, and web chat. Analyze messaging conversations alongside voice data to uncover trends, preferences, and patterns throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Integrated AI agent observability with ConversationRelay

Any company rolling out an AI agent to its customers will need the ability to monitor its performance “in the wild.” Observability is critical to understanding whether AI agents are behaving appropriately, satisfying customer requests, and ultimately generating their intended ROI.

To simplify this for customers building AI agents with Twilio, Conversational Intelligence now natively integrates with ConversationRelay, Twilio’s AI agent orchestration tool. Gain built-in visibility into AI agent performance, spot breakdowns before they escalate, and use insights to fine-tune AI agent behavior over time. As part of Twilio’s broader Conversational AI suite, this integration makes it more straightforward than ever to roll out high-performing AI agents with rich, contextual insights to back them up.

Check out the demo video to see the ConversationRelay integration at work for virtual agent observability:

With this integration, your team will be able to leverage conversational data to definitively answer key questions like:

• Did the AI achieve its goal?
• Did the agent hallucinate or provide incorrect information?
• Did the agent violate any compliance or safety protocols?
• Did the customer want to escalate to a human?

Analyzing conversations between customers and AI agents is now as straightforward as adding one additional parameter in your <ConversationRelay> TwiML definition to send the transcript to Conversational Intelligence:

Check out our guide for how to get started with Conversational Intelligence with ConversationRelay, including example Language Operators for hallucination detection, task completion, sentiment, and more.

GenAI powered language analysis

Conversational Intelligence is bolstered by cross-channel AI-powered Language Operators for gaining insights that can drive real ROI and foster deeper customer relationships.

Whether you're flagging compliance violations in support calls, scoring interactions via chat, or monitoring your AI agents, Generative Custom Operators – our newest and most powerful Language Operator yet – let you scale language intelligence with ease. Generative Custom Operators allow you to use natural language to describe what you want to understand from customer interactions, explicitly tailored to your business's unique needs. Powered by Generative AI, these operators handle sophisticated analysis tasks with high accuracy, unlocking far more value from every conversation.

Let’s say you run a retail customer service team. Every call is a chance to build loyalty—or lose it. But keeping tabs on agent performance across thousands of conversations? That’s currently a tough task. With Generative Custom Operators, instead of sifting through endless call recordings, you can automate call scoring based on what really matters. Did the agent sound engaged and empathetic? Did they actually know their stuff? Did they solve the customer’s issue on the first try?

Unlike old-school speech analytics, this AI picks up on conversational context and nuance— just like a real supervisor would. The result? Instant coaching insights, more consistent customer experiences, and way fewer manual reviews.

Check out the demo video to see Generative Custom Operators in action:

Here are just a few additional examples of how customers are using Generative Custom Operators:

• Script Adherence: Check if contact center agents followed the script and met their goals.
• Sales Follow-Up: Generate an automated follow-up email for a sales prospect based on identified next steps from the conversation.
• Competitive Intelligence: Detect competitor mentions along with the reason for comparison
• Upsell Identification: Spot high-potential upsell opportunities based on conversation context.
• Lead Qualification: Extract indicators of lead quality based on buying signals and sentiment

And this is just the beginning. With a simple natural language prompt, you can measure what matters most to your business—because if you can describe it, you can track it.

Conversational Intelligence for Messaging unlocks truly omnichannel intelligence

By adding support for the Conversations API, Conversational Intelligence now enables advanced language analysis across both voice and messaging. A myriad of Twilio messaging channels are supported by Conversational Intelligence – SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, web chat, Facebook Messenger and more. This means your business can now use a single AI engine to understand and optimize the entire conversation journey – whether it's a customer calling into your support center or chatting with an agent via messaging.

Check out the demo video below to see Conversational Intelligence for Messaging in action:

With Conversational Intelligence for messaging, businesses can enhance agent performance, optimize sales cycles, and increase customer satisfaction at scale. A 360-degree view of every customer interaction unlocks deeper insights, smarter automations, and more consistent experiences across every touchpoint.

Conversational Intelligence is now available in private beta – you can request access to the private beta here.

Ready to Get Started?

• 👉 Explore the Conversational Intelligence docs
• 👉  Build the Conversational Intelligence and ConversationRelay integration demo in Node.js
• 👉 Get building using Conversational Intelligence with ConversationRelay
• 👉 Request access to Conversational Intelligence for Messaging

Seize the opportunity in every customer conversation – and make each one count!

Jeff Eiden is Director of Product for Twilio Conversational Intelligence