Twilio offers all manner of telephony functionality as a modular platform. Want to voice enable your app Need to embed SMS into you mobile offering? Twilio is the solution for you. api.ai, on the other hand, builds conversational interfaces for connected devices. What that means in plain language is that api.ai enables natural language understanding and, from that understanding, the ability to respond intelligently to a customer's intent.
api.ai "understands" human speech and, much like Apple's Siri or Google's Now product, continuously improves its responds with each command users make of it. api.ai has been used by manufacturers, software designers, telcos, and hardware companies to create voice-enabled products.
So if you're api.ai and you want to extend your offering, who better to integrate with than the platform that powers broad communications functionality for a huge number of applications? That is the genesis of a recent integration between Twilio and api.ai. In api.ai's view, Twilio does a great job of enabling organizations to send notifications to customers but live support is still delivered the traditional way. By developing a conversational interface, and making it seamless for organizations to leverage that platform within their own real-time conversational tools, api.ai will bring a heightened level of customer service and efficiency to the service function within organizations.
An example in practice: instead of filling out reservations in an online form, consumers can simply text the details of what they want to a Twilio-integrated app. api.ai’s platform will then decipher and clarify user intent, reply via text, and pass the request back to the company. An example of how the integration is working, in this case with reservation management service HostMe:
Customer sends text to HostMe: “I’d like to book a reservation at an Italian restaurant near my office for tonight at 8pm.
HostMe: “How fancy would you like it to be?”
Customer: “Please make sure it has least 4 stars on Yelp and costs less than $30 dollars per entree.”
HostMe: “Great, for how many people?”
Customer: “2 people and we want a seat near the window.”
HostMe: “Got it. How about Cafe Picasso at 8pm? They have 4.5 stars and are known for the best linguini in the city and are rated the best customer service in the city.”
Customer: “Sounds delicious, let’s book it.”
This integration would seem to be timely given recent statistics about text-based messaging. As the use of text and instant messaging increases, there is a corresponding increase in consumers' desire to transact customer service requests via these same channels. All too often however, the cost and practicalities of fulfilling this latent demand means that it simply isn't viable. Creating this autonomous layer of interactions which is essentially frictionless helps meet consumers demands in an economically sustainable way.
This looks like a pretty cool integration and gets us close to a position of actually being able to converse in a human-like way with applications and devices. It will be interesting to watch the implementations of this integration.
