Step Into the Future: Expanded Access and Features for AI Assistants

Step Into the Future: Expanded Access and Features for AI Assistants

Over the last four months of Developer Preview for AI Assistants, we’ve seen incredible engagement from our community. We’ve engaged with startups and Global 2000s who have built AI Assistants with Twilio as part of their journey to personalize and automate customer engagement. We’ve seen use cases from automated pre-sales and lead qualification, to product onboarding Assistants and customer support.

Your enthusiasm and insightful feedback have been invaluable; we’ve had countless customer calls to understand your needs better and continuously refine our offerings. As a result, we are incredibly excited to move into the next phase of Developer Preview, making AI Assistants more scalable and accessible to all Twilio customers.

New features rolling out on September 23rd

• Full Conversation History UI and API: Gain comprehensive insights into all your conversations with our new Full Conversation History UI and API. Access detailed data including messages exchanged, tools utilized, and knowledge sources engaged, regardless of whether the conversation took place via the simulator or other channels.
• Introducing AI Constellation Models: Constellations solve for flexibility by providing a system where Assistants can now use business logic or other criteria to select from a number of available models, each with different capabilities and strengths, to best solve for the problem at hand.
  
  • Our new Constellation Model (called v1-base) has shown significant improvements over our previous model, achieving a reduction in latency, fewer actions needed, and improvement on task completions.
• Enhanced Public APIs: Our Public APIs have been streamlined to make it more straightforward to programmatically build AI Assistants and manage knowledge and tools. This means a smoother, more efficient development process for you.
• Knowledge Improvements: We’re introducing a new knowledge crawler optimized specifically for AI Assistants. Whether your crawler use case requires rendering JavaScript content, language filtering, or regular expression matching for more granular control over what gets crawled, we've got you covered. Plus, enjoy summarized crawling metadata and the ability to crawl sub-links on pages for deeper, more comprehensive knowledge gathering.

Introducing our first pricing model

With broader accessibility and new features comes our first pricing model for AI Assistants:

• Say Goodbye to Message Limits: We’re removing the current limit of 1000 messages per Account.
• Complimentary Messages: Kickstart your projects with an allowance of free AI Assistant-generated messages per Account each month, making it cost-effective to build and test your Assistant.
• Pay-As-You-Go:After the complimentary messages, a fee will apply per generated message, along with any additional connectivity costs (e.g., SMS fees, WhatsApp message fees, etc.).
• Extended Capabilities: We’re increasing limits for Knowledge and Tools, along with expanding the length for personality prompts to support more intricate use cases.

For detailed pricing information, please refer to the latest pricing details in our docs.

Why build with AI Assistants?

In the rapidly evolving world of AI, many developers have experimented with prototyping solutions. While building an impressive Generative AI demo is doable, scaling it to a production-ready application that keeps pace with state-of-the-art advancements requires extensive investment. This often includes building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions, implementing safety features, and managing effective memory handling. Twilio AI Assistants simplify this by letting you focus on what truly matters—creating exceptional customer experiences. Just as Twilio’s Programmable Messaging and Voice abstract away the complexities of telecommunications infrastructure, our AI Assistants streamline the development of customer-aware, omnichannel autonomous agents.

AI Assistants provide a framework focused on customer experience, while boasting built-in safety features such as content moderation and prompt injection detection. This framework ensures that your AI Assistant remains up-to-date with the latest advancements in AI without necessitating constant rework, while letting your implementation be opinionated and extensible. Assistants are built on top of Customer Memory which automatically keeps track of conversation history and can reference any data you have in a Segment Profile, while also building a customer profile even if you are not using Segment yet.

With API-first principles, you can create, manage, and deploy AI Assistants tailored to your specific use case while safely connecting to any data source. You can also integrate with Twilio’s native channels such as Conversations and Voice. With Twilio’s platform taking care of the heavy lifting, you can concentrate on delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Looking ahead

The journey with AI Assistants is just beginning, and the future is even more exciting. Stay tuned for upcoming enhancements like native voice integration, custom guardrails, daily summaries, and advanced intelligence capabilities. We’re committed to evolving our AI Assistants and continuing to provide top-notch support to help you leverage these powerful tools.

To stay informed:

• Check out our refreshed docs: Our documentation is continually updated to offer the best guidance.
• Reach out anytime : For questions, support, or feedback, connect with us at twilioalpha@twilio.com.

Here’s to building remarkable AI-driven solutions together. We can’t wait to see what you build!

Rachel is a Principal Project Manager on the Emerging Technology and Innovation team. Her passions are solving customer pain points and integrating product development with analytics for data-driven decision-making. She also loves playing Settlers of Catan and watching Survivor. Connect with Rachel at rbaskin [at] twilio.com.