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PolyAI

Conversational AI chatbots for enterprise customer service

Free | Freemium | Paid | Enterprise ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ 4.4/5 🤖 Chatbots & Agents 🕒 Updated
Visit PolyAI ↗ Official website
Quick Verdict

PolyAI is a conversational AI platform that builds voice and text contact-center chatbots for enterprise customer service. It targets customer experience teams and contact centers needing multilingual, turn-taking dialogue that integrates with phone and CRM systems. Pricing is enterprise-focused with custom quotes, plus limited trial options; it's best for organizations that need production-grade, phone-capable agents rather than inexpensive self-serve chat widgets.

PolyAI is a conversational AI provider in the Chatbots & Agents category that builds telephone-capable and text-based customer service agents for contact centers. The company emphasizes natural conversational turn-taking, multilingual support, and deployment into phone systems and CRMs as its primary capability. Its key differentiator is a contact-center pedigree—models and tooling designed for live voice, handoffs, and SLA-aware integrations—serving enterprises in retail, telecom, and banking. Pricing is aimed at enterprise buyers with custom plans; limited trials are available but there is no broad free tier for production use.

About PolyAI

PolyAI is a conversational AI company founded in 2020, headquartered in London, focused on building voice-first and text-first virtual agents for contact centers. The startup positioned itself to solve complex interactive voice response (IVR) and post-IVR handoff problems by combining dialogue managers, speech recognition integrations, and multi-turn conversation engineering. Its core value proposition is reducing call handle time and improving containment by deploying agents that can speak naturally, recognize interruptions, and preserve context across long conversations while connecting to enterprise telephony and CRM systems.

PolyAI's product set centers on a conversational platform that includes a dialogue manager, real-time voice integration, and analytics. The dialogue manager supports multi-turn flows that persist context across sessions and can hand off to human agents, while the voice stack integrates with SIP/UCaaS providers for live calls and supports text-to-speech and ASR tuned for customer-service acoustics. The tooling includes a conversation studio for authoring intents, slot-filling, and fallback policies, plus an analytics dashboard that surfaces containment rates, average handle time, and per-intent performance. PolyAI also offers APIs and webhooks to pull customer data from CRMs like Salesforce and to push events for logging or agent assist.

On pricing, PolyAI does not publish simple per-seat consumer tiers; instead it sells via enterprise contracts and custom quotes. There are limited pilot or proof-of-concept engagements (sometimes trial-period pilots) but no fully featured free production tier. Customers typically pay setup and deployment fees plus a per-conversation or per-minute runtime cost in enterprise agreements; published examples and press materials indicate negotiations vary by contact volume and integrations. For smaller customers or experimentation, PolyAI has historically offered pilots and PoCs under time- or volume-limited terms rather than a permanent freemium plan.

Real-world users include contact-center directors deploying voice bots to reduce live-agent transfers and ecommerce operations teams using text agents for order-tracking workflows. For example, a Head of Contact Center might use PolyAI to cut average handle time by automating routine billing queries, while a Customer Experience Manager uses it to run multilingual self-service for returns. PolyAI competes with vendors like [competitor] in the conversational contact-center space, but its focus on SIP telephony integration, multilingual prebuilt voice flows, and enterprise-grade handoff policies differentiates it from typical web-chat-first providers like Drift or Intercom.

What makes PolyAI different

Three capabilities that set PolyAI apart from its nearest competitors.

  • Native SIP telephony integration enabling agents to answer real phone calls with session-level control
  • Built-in conversation manager that preserves long-running context and supports human handoff policies
  • Enterprise-grade analytics and SLA options combined with pilot PoCs instead of fixed low-tier plans

Is PolyAI right for you?

✅ Best for
  • Contact center directors who need reduced handle times and live-call containment
  • Customer experience managers who need multilingual self-service across voice and chat
  • Telecom operators who need SIP-integrated conversational agents for high call volume
  • Enterprises who need CRM-integrated bots with audit and compliance controls
❌ Skip it if
  • Skip if you need a low-cost self-serve chat widget for a small website.
  • Skip if you require transparent per-user pricing for tiny teams.

✅ Pros

  • Designed for live voice: SIP/telephony support for real phone calls and call control
  • Multilingual capabilities across 20+ languages tailored to contact-center acoustics
  • Enterprise integration: APIs and webhooks for Salesforce and other CRM systems

❌ Cons

  • No published self-serve pricing; procurement requires sales engagement and custom agreement
  • Less suitable for very small businesses due to enterprise-focused deployment and setup costs

PolyAI Pricing Plans

Current tiers and what you get at each price point. Verified against the vendor's pricing page.

Plan Price What you get Best for
Pilot / PoC Custom / time-limited Short-term trial with limited call minutes and features Enterprises validating voice or text automation
Core (Enterprise) Custom Includes production deployment, per-minute or per-conversation billing Contact centers needing phone and CRM integrations
Enterprise+ Custom SLA, dedicated support, advanced integrations and higher throughput Large enterprises with mission-critical contact centers

Best Use Cases

  • Head of Contact Center using it to reduce average handle time by 20% on billing calls
  • Customer Experience Manager using it to achieve 60% self-service containment for returns
  • Telecom Operations Lead using it to automate verification and routing, cutting transfers by 30%

Integrations

Salesforce Twilio (SIP/Programmable Voice) Amazon Connect

How to Use PolyAI

  1. 1
    Request a pilot engagement
    Visit the PolyAI contact page and click 'Request a demo' to start a pilot. Provide call volume, channels, and integration needs — success looks like receiving a pilot proposal and initial scope within days.
  2. 2
    Configure telephony integration
    Work with PolyAI to set up SIP/UCaaS connectivity (or Twilio/Amazon Connect). Verify inbound call routing and test audio quality; success is a connected test line and passing ASR transcription checks.
  3. 3
    Build flows in Conversation Studio
    Open the Conversation Studio, create intents and slot-filling flows, and set fallback/handoff policies. Test using the built-in simulator until the agent correctly resolves sample calls without agent handoff.
  4. 4
    Integrate CRM webhooks
    Enable the Salesforce integration via API keys and map fields for caller context and case creation. Validate end-to-end by making a test call that creates or updates a CRM record.

PolyAI vs Alternatives

Bottom line

Choose PolyAI over Google Contact Center AI if you prioritize turnkey SIP telephony integration and dedicated conversational studio for voice-first agents.

Head-to-head comparisons between PolyAI and top alternatives:

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PolyAI vs ZEPETO
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Frequently Asked Questions

How much does PolyAI cost?+
Cost is custom and sold via enterprise contracts. Pricing depends on channels, call volume, and integrations; customers typically sign setup fees and pay per-minute or per-conversation runtime. PolyAI offers pilot/proof-of-concept engagements to validate ROI before full deployment; request a quote from sales for a precise estimate based on your contact-center metrics.
Is there a free version of PolyAI?+
There is no open permanent free production tier. PolyAI provides limited pilot or PoC engagements for evaluation but does not publish a perpetual free plan; production use requires a commercial agreement. For small self-serve sites, the enterprise sales model and setup expectations make PolyAI less suitable than low-cost chat widget vendors.
How does PolyAI compare to Google Contact Center AI?+
PolyAI emphasizes turnkey voice and SIP telephony integrations for live calls, whereas Google CCAI focuses on cloud-first AI tools and broader platform services. Choose PolyAI when you need vendor-delivered voice agent flows and SIP connectivity, and choose Google CCAI if you prefer a cloud-native AI layer with broader Google Cloud integrations.
What is PolyAI best used for?+
PolyAI is best for contact centers needing voice-capable virtual agents. It excels at multilingual, multi-turn customer service tasks—billing, order tracking, verification—and reducing live-agent transfers while integrating with telephony and CRM systems for production deployments.
How do I get started with PolyAI?+
Start by requesting a demo or pilot on poly.ai and share call volumes and use cases. PolyAI will scope a PoC, connect a test SIP line or cloud telephony (Twilio/Amazon Connect), and help build initial flows; success looks like a working pilot with measurement metrics.

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