Telnyx & Replicant Building Future of Contact Center AI

Telnyx, the world’s only self-service, full-stack communications platform, has partnered with conversational AI technology company Replicant.ai to offer a seamless phone support experience that’s transforming the way humans talk to machines.

Using a combination of machine learning algorithms, Voice AI technology and a lightning-fast telephony stack built on Telnyx’s private, global communications network, Replicant has created a talking bot (the “Thinking Machine”) that actually listens to customers and engages in fluent conversations to solve problems in real time. The technology is so advanced that it’s easy to forget you’re talking to a machine — not that Replicant wants you to.

“We’re not trying to be human,” said Benjamin Gleitzman, Replicant CTO and co-founder. “At Replicant, we’re always going to be upfront that you’re speaking with a machine. It’s the best sounding machine you’ve ever heard, and probably the smartest too, but we’re not trying to trick people.”

Replicant’s Thinking Machine can be deployed in a matter of days to quickly deliver high-touch customer service over the phone without hiring, offshoring or adding complex technical infrastructure to call centers.

By collecting knowledge from each caller interaction, the Thinking Machine becomes smarter over time to proactively troubleshoot customer issues. But to create a real conversational experience, Replicant had to find a way to improve machine response times from three seconds to one.

“We weren’t sure if a human-like conversation was even possible,” explained Gleitzman. “We had a call flow working with our previous provider, but because of the telephony latency it was slow and would wait a couple of beats before responding.”

The immediate back-and-forth flow of human conversation is difficult to recreate using machines. Some providers try to cover up this latency with typing sounds or audible “ums” and “uhs” to hide the fact that the machine is taking a long time to respond, but Replicant didn’t want to go that route.

“People notice when you’re trying to cover up latency, and it begins to make the conversation sluggish and leaves callers impatient and asking for an agent,” said Gleitzman. “It’s very important that we’re genuine and honest with our customers. It’s one of the reasons we focus on latency and engineer our systems to save every millisecond we can. Because we’re able to get latency down to the level we want with Telnyx, we don’t have to bend the truth with our customers like some of our competitors.”

Unlike other communications providers, Telnyx manages its own network, pulling communications off the public internet and onto a private, secure environment for reduced latency and better call quality.

“Because of the unique way that the Replicant AI interacts with customers, standard network latency wasn’t cutting it,” said Ian Reither, COO of Telnyx. “They were looking for a level of speed and consistency that other providers just can’t deliver. As a full-fledged carrier with a network built for the future, Telnyx was able to provide the immediate, real-time functionality they needed to support a conversational AI solution that’s revolutionizing the customer service industry.”

Replicant is changing how customers interact with contact center technologies like AI and interactive voice response (IVR) in an industry where customers are often frustrated by chatbot interactions. But Gleitzman believes that machines are ready to have these complex conversations.

“Voice is part of what makes us human, yet existing systems often require callers to descend into the world of machines and press numbers on the keypad. So being able to lift machines up to the level of humans — not to say that they are human, but rather that they have a human ability — is empowering and will have a massive impact on how we interact with machines in the future.”

Telnyx and Replicant will be at Customer Contact Week (CCW) 2019 in Las Vegas from June 26 to 27. Stop by booth 106 in the CCW Expo Hall to see firsthand how Replicant built their conversational AI platform on top of the Telnyx global infrastructure.

About Replicant

Founded in 2017, Replicant is a Conversational AI technology that works out of the box to solve customer problems over the phone. The platform lets you offer high-touch customer service without hiring, offshoring or adding complex technical infrastructure to your call center.

Replicant's state-of-the-art AI voice technology enables full phone and text conversations between a bot (the “Thinking Machine”) and a customer by listening to questions, thinking fast, taking action and providing a rewarding, real answer in a pleasant voice.

About Telnyx Telnyx delivers voice, messaging and more for next-gen communications applications. A communications platform and partner that provides global carrier-grade services, Telnyx maintains a global, private IP network and grants its customers unprecedented control over their communications through its innovative portal and intuitive APIs.

Telnyx products include voice (e.g., Call Control, Elastic SIP Trunking, Global Numbers), programmatic messaging, embedded communications and automated networking. Customers provision services a la carte and pay by usage for scalable, on-demand communications.

Every Telnyx customer has access to 24/7 in-house engineering support and a dedicated customer success representative, and Telnyx continues to offer complimentary enterprise services like configuration management, enterprise security and fraud detection. For more information, please visit telnyx.com.