Cognigy vs Sinch (2026)

Cognigy is technology agnostic by design and integrates with any CCaaS, CRM or business system, including Genesys, Avaya, NiCE CXone, Amazon Connect, SAP and Salesforce, taking authenticated action across the contact center estate.

Handover Providers are configured per platform, with a NiCE CXone non integrated provider added in the 2026.9 release for handover without a platform level integration, a Salesforce MIAW provider maintained, and Agent Copilot embeddable directly in the Salesforce Agent Console. Beyond handover, Connections hold credentials, Extensions package custom Nodes, and Code Nodes and the Node Execution API reach complex legacy systems and internal tools that have no connector. The actions are transactional, and rebooking, cancellation, order status, invoice requests, payment and refunds are outcomes the agents execute.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Handover Providers and release notes 2026.9, cognigy.com AI Ops and orchestration pageread 2026-09-06

Action blocks connect a bot to outside systems in three ways. An API step sends requests to any HTTPS endpoint with any of the five standard HTTP methods, authenticates with basic auth or a bearer token, passes session variables in the query or body, and can route the conversation to the next block named in the response. Code actions run JavaScript that calls external services and writes the results back to the session.

Native app steps create, find and update Zendesk tickets and users, create Salesforce contacts, accounts and cases or run SOQL queries, and connect Freshdesk, Topdesk, Gmail and Intercom. In a banking bot, an API step can post a money transfer's amount, destination and account type to the customer's back end in the middle of a conversation.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/integrateandcode/custom-back-end-integrations/configure-your-api-integrationread 2026-10-11

Agents are built as Flows of Nodes in a unified visual builder covering chat and voice together. Say and Question Nodes handle turns, LLM Prompt and LLM Entity Extract make model calls, Go To jumps within a Flow, Code Nodes and Transformers carry logic the builder does not express, Search Extract Output handles retrieval, and Handover to Human Agent is a terminal path.

Agentic AI reasons across channels and orchestrates actions to move from conversation to resolution, executing transactions such as rebooking, cancellation, order status, invoice requests, payment and refunds. Flows compose into Snapshots that carry all resources, logic, content, configuration, NLU models and Extensions as one deployable unit, so each orchestration ships as a release artifact.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Node Reference and Snapshots, cognigy.com AI Ops and orchestration pageread 2026-09-06

Bots run as flows on a visual canvas, where each block sends a message, collects input, checks a condition or runs an action, and go to connections move the conversation between blocks and flows.

Condition blocks branch on variables, an API response can name the next block, events start a flow when a variable changes or the user goes quiet, and delay and pause steps hold the conversation. Flows can be reused across a bot and published one at a time. The intent engine picks the flow and the designer sets every step inside it, so the sequence is fixed when the bot is built. Running two bots in one conversation takes the web widget or a custom proxy over the webhook channel.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/navigation/bot-builder/flowsread 2026-10-11

Voice, chat and digital channels are served with intelligent IVR and self service in more than a hundred languages, delivered through Endpoints that separate the agent from the channel. Webchat v3 is the web surface, and the in house Voice Gateway has its own self service portal and SIP infrastructure, with SBC configuration and TLS handling exposed in the release notes.

Endpoints are kept out of Snapshots so channel configuration and agent logic version independently. In production the platform handles tens of thousands of concurrent sessions and peaks around 375,000 interactions a day, across several independent inbound queues including telephony. Work arrives by channel, and Cognigy describes no scheduled or event driven triggers.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Endpoints, Voice Gateway and release notes, cognigy.com platform pageread 2026-09-06

Conversations arrive through the Sinch Conversation API on WhatsApp, RCS, SMS, MMS, Messenger, Instagram, Viber, Telegram and LINE, through the Web V2 widget, through a webhook channel for any custom front end, and through phone lines for voicebots.

Inside a conversation, events start a flow when a variable changes, when the user stays silent for anywhere from 1 to 1,440 minutes, or when a WhatsApp Flow is completed.

Outside systems can also push into a live conversation through the REST API, sending messages, setting session data or triggering a specific block for a given user, so a back end event can move a conversation forward.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/channels/all-channelsread 2026-10-11

Knowledge AI is a retrieval product with its own license, quota model and vector store. Customers upload knowledge as PDF, Cognigy Text or web pages, or connect external systems through Knowledge Connectors, to create Knowledge Sources, and agents use RAG over those documents to give accurate, context aware responses.

Retrieval is wired into the Flow through the Search Extract Output Node for agents and the Copilot Knowledge Tile for human agents, which returns source links naming the files an answer came from.

The corpus is licensed in Knowledge Chunk quotas allocated across organizations through the Management UI or the Cognigy.AI API, and on premises installations use Weaviate as the vector database, with operators told to upgrade it to v1.22.5.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Knowledge AI overview and activation, release notes 4.68read 2026-09-06

Knowledge base AI keeps a store of the customer's content and generates short answers from it. Content goes in as PDF files, CSV question and answer files, single web pages or entire domains, and tags limit which content a given flow searches.

Each answer comes back with the retrieved passages, the source file or URL and the specific page it came from, so a bot can offer a link to the source. When nothing matches, a no findings path sends the user to another block instead of inventing an answer, and a non generative mode replies only with the exact answers in a CSV file. The feature is free up to 50 questions a month, with higher volumes through sales.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/navigation/knowledge-base-airead 2026-10-11

Conversation context carries across channels, so a handover keeps history intact, and the Interaction Panel lets a developer inspect what sits in the agent's memory during a session. Cognigy does not say what an agent keeps about a contact between separate conversations, whether state is scoped per user, per session or per organization, how long it lasts, or how an operator inspects or deletes it for one person. Knowledge Sources hold knowledge, not memory. The developer reference is large, and a state model behind the memory inspection may be described there.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Interaction Panel and Developer Referenceread 2026-09-06

Each user's session holds what the bot has learned about them, including variables it collected, API results and the last intent, and one session can span several conversations. Sessions expire after 30 days without activity by default, a period Enterprise customers can change per bot and separately for the draft and live versions.

Through the REST API a team can read a session, write to it, delete it for one conversation or delete all data for one user. Bots use saved variables to recognize returning users and reuse earlier answers, such as a traveler's usual route. Persistence depends on the channel, and the web widget keeps variables for one visit unless users are identified. Variables marked sensitive stay out of conversation history.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/bot-answers/sessionread 2026-10-11

Handover Providers are configured per contact center platform, a dedicated Handover Flow controls the interaction with the human agent and the transfer, and a Handover to Human Agent Node sits in the Flow. Agent Copilot workspaces then suggest next actions and surface knowledge with source links to the person now holding the conversation.

Escalation is a designed path that keeps context intact, and role based access control enforcing separation of duties limits who can change agent behavior. There is no review and approve step over agent output, such as a pre send queue, draft review mode, confidence threshold or per action sign off. The agent answers and acts on its own until a Handover Node or a configured condition moves the conversation to a person.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Agent Copilot getting started, Handover Providers and Handover Featuresread 2026-09-06

A Send to offload provider step hands a conversation to a person in Sinch Contact Pro, Genesys Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk Chat, Help Scout or any platform behind an offloading webhook, with the transcript and collected variables passed along. The bot keeps answering until an agent accepts, then pauses until the agent sends the user back.

Designers choose where handover happens, typically on request, after repeated not understood turns or after two unsatisfactory knowledge base answers. Generative features can be switched off per bot, and a split between draft and live versions keeps unpublished changes away from customers. No step lets a person approve an action or a reply before the bot sends it.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/integrateandcode/human-offloading-live-chatread 2026-10-11

Cognigy's public trust center lists ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and ISO 42001, the last of which certifies an AI management system specifically. Cognigy also holds SOC 2 Type II and PCI DSS 4.0, the latter with independent QSA attestation, along with the TISAX and BSI C5 attestations, GDPR and HIPAA alignment, and work under way mapping SOC 2 controls to HITRUST CSF.

Access is governed by granular role based access control enforcing separation of duties, with the Management UI distinguishing admin rights for organization level tasks such as allocating Knowledge Chunk quotas, alongside end to end encryption in transit and at rest and detailed audit logs.

Sourcetrust.cognigy.com, docs.cognigy.com Administration and Knowledge AI activationread 2026-09-06

Sign in runs through Sinch ID, and SAML 2.0 single sign on with Azure Active Directory, Okta, OneLogin or Ping Identity comes with the Enterprise pack. Admins see every bot and manage the team, members see open bots plus the restricted bots they are granted, and each restricted bot gives a member one of five permissions, Edit, Read only, NLP only, Bot Builder or Copywriter.

Legacy password accounts lock after 10 failed sign ins. Chatlayer is ISO 27001 certified, and across its products Sinch holds ISO 27001:2022 and a SOC 2 Type II report, with PCI and HIPAA compliance covering specific products. Security reports and 343 answered questionnaire items sit in the Sinch Trust Center behind an access request.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/support/access-controlread 2026-10-11

Detailed audit logs capture every configuration change and user action, recording who altered the agent and when, and cover platform administration as well as conversations. The Interaction Panel executes a Flow node by node in Debug Mode against a chosen Flow, Locale and Snapshot, shows the agent's memory during a session, and can follow a live session by user identifier, so a specific run can be reconstructed step by step. Insights transcripts, from which a Playbook can be generated, and analytics and reporting across the conversational estate sit alongside.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Interaction Panel and Insights, cognigy.com AI Ops and orchestration pageread 2026-09-06

Conversation history keeps a turn by turn transcript of every conversation with the intents triggered along the way, voice recordings where recording is on, and tags and filters by user, channel, campaign and date.

Execution logs record each app integration run with its input and output payloads, status, account and the block that triggered it, plus failed API and code actions with the request, status code and response, tracking events and voice speech to text failures. An activity log on the Enterprise pack shows who accessed or changed a bot, what they did and when, and every published live version is kept for rollback. A conversation flow view, labeled beta, traces a conversation's path through blocks for debugging.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/navigation/history/execution-logsread 2026-10-11

Cognigy runs as a self hosted product as well as a service.

Release notes for on premises installations cover a YAML based data redaction configuration introduced in the 2026.9 release to replace environment variables, with rollout percentage control and per organization exclusions via values.yaml, an ingress controller feature flag governing Traefik middleware resources, parameterized certificate secret names in the sbc-sip DaemonSet and StatefulSet, a Weaviate version upgrade instruction for on premises installations running Knowledge AI, and a concurrency limit for Playbook execution set through values.yaml.

Licensing distinguishes shared SaaS, dedicated SaaS and on premises routes, with Knowledge AI quotas administered differently for each, so a customer can run Cognigy inside its own infrastructure with Kubernetes level configuration exposed to the operator. The on premises route needs an operator able to run the underlying Kubernetes cluster.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com release notes 2026.9, 4.68 and 4.72, Knowledge AI activationread 2026-09-06

Bots run in one of three regions on Google Cloud, each with its own app URL and sign in endpoint, in St. Ghislain, Belgium for the EU, Ashburn, Virginia for the US and Mumbai, India for Asia. Moving bots between regions goes through support, and fixed ingress and egress IP ranges per region let customers allowlist Chatlayer in their own networks.

Sinch's subprocessor register adds Brazil and India as Chatlayer hosting locations, and the Tables API has a South America endpoint, so some data can sit outside the three bot regions. Generative replies through the OpenAI integration send conversation data to OpenAI services in the United States.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/support/saas-regions-and-ip-rangesread 2026-10-11

Customers get reusable parts to assemble into their own agents.

The Node library covers conversation, logic, LLM prompting, entity extraction and handover, Extensions package custom Nodes, Packages export and import resources, including Knowledge AI resources and Playbooks, between installations, Snapshots capture a complete agent as a portable archive, and prebuilt handover providers and connectors cover the contact center estate.

These move work between projects and environments. There is no template gallery, agent library, industry starter pack or marketplace of prebuilt agents, so the route to a live agent is building a Flow from Nodes, configuring Endpoints and handover, and testing it with Playbooks.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Extensions, Packages, Node Reference and Snapshotsread 2026-09-06

New bots can start from templates built by Chatlayer's conversation design team, each a working bot for one job.

The set covers a banking assistant that makes payments, checks balances and card limits and reports lost cards, ecommerce returns, an electric bike shop that books test rides and checkups, shared scooter support, a bilingual gym assistant that books and cancels classes, job applications, lead generation, NPS surveys, restaurant and retail bots, a nearest location finder and a knowledge base AI bot.

Most work as soon as they load, while those using an integration need an account connected first. Smaller templates add a single function, such as feedback collection, to a bot that already exists.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/start-quickly/bot-templatesread 2026-10-11

The customer sets up an account with one of the supported LLM providers, configures the provider in Settings and selects the model from the supported list, and individual Nodes state which model capabilities they need. The provider set is maintained as a shipped feature, and the 2026.9 release added Google GenAI as a provider with the Gemini 3 family, including gemini-3.1-pro-preview, gemini-3-flash-preview and gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview.

Customers are subject to the terms of the generative AI providers they use, and Cognigy disclaims responsibility for those services, since the customer holds the provider relationship. The same choice extends beyond the language model to natural language understanding, speech to text and text to speech, so the customer assembles the stack, brings the account, selects the model and can swap it later.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Generative AI and LLMs section, 2026.9 release notes, Knowledge AI overviewread 2026-09-06

An OpenAI action lets a builder pick GPT-3, ChatGPT or GPT-4 for a generated reply, using Chatlayer's own key for the first 100 messages per bot and the customer's OpenAI key after that.

The other generative features, knowledge base AI, the AI intent booster and expression generation, run on unnamed models Chatlayer picks, with OpenAI and Microsoft Azure as Chatlayer's machine learning subprocessors. Intent recognition runs on Chatlayer's own language engine, trained on each customer's expressions.

OpenAI is the only model provider in the integration catalog, and the model list in the OpenAI action still reflects the GPT-3 era.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/integrateandcode/app-integrations/openai-gpt-3-chatgpt-and-gpt-4read 2026-10-11

The Developer Reference covers the Cognigy.AI API, the Playbooks API with its own OpenAPI specification for creating and scheduling test runs remotely, the Node Execution API function reference and the Knowledge Connector API function reference.

Extensions build custom Nodes, Packages move resources between installations, and Code Nodes, Transformers and CognigyScript let builders drop to code where the low code builder stops. Administration APIs reach the Management UI, and Knowledge Chunk quotas can be set through the API as well as the interface.

An outside caller can drive Cognigy to run a test, execute a node, feed a knowledge connector or administer an organization. Cognigy describes no MCP server for the platform.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Developer Reference, Playbooks, Knowledge Connector API and Node Execution APIread 2026-09-06

A public REST API with an OpenAPI 3.0 specification covers messaging, conversations, bots and NLP.

It sends messages through the webhook channel with asynchronous callbacks, lists conversations and messages, reads and deletes session data, deletes a user's data, executes actions in a live conversation, lists bots and channels, creates webhook channels and returns the NLP result for any expression. Calls authenticate with bearer tokens generated under Settings.

A separate Tables API, with basic authentication and regional base URLs, loads and queries the built in tables that bots read and write, and whole bots export and import as files.

Sourceapi.chatlayer.ai/v1/docsread 2026-10-11

Playbooks are Cognigy's test tool. A Playbook holds up to 50 Steps, each carrying input text and data sent to the agent and Assertions that check the response and aspects of the Flow against a defined value, and assertions can be inverted to check that a value is absent. Runs execute as background Tasks with results in a Runs tab filterable by status and creator.

Up to ten Playbooks run at once, with the limit configurable on premises through MAX_CONCURRENT_PLAYBOOK_EXECUTIONS in values.yaml, and a Playbooks API allows remote creation and scheduled runs against the OpenAPI specification. Playbooks can be generated from a live conversation or an Insights transcript and exported as a Package, and Cognigy calls them automated QA testing for regression.

The Interaction Panel adds manual runs against a chosen Flow, Locale and Snapshot with node by node debugging, and Snapshots package a complete agent for promotion between development, QA and production endpoints.

Sourcedocs.cognigy.com Test section, Playbooks and Interaction Panel, Cognigy support center Playbooks guidanceread 2026-09-06

An NLP dashboard rates each language's intent model from 0 to 100 percent, shows how that rating moved since the last training, and flags intents with too few expressions, misclassified expressions and overlaps between intents.

After launch, the Train tab collects real customer messages with the suggested intent and a confidence score, and the team corrects them and adds them to the model ahead of the next release. An emulator with a debugger shows session data turn by turn, voicebots and a WhatsApp sandbox can be tried before going live, and a bad release rolls back to an earlier live version. Saved test cases that replay flows, actions or knowledge base answers are not part of the product.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/navigation/natural-language-processing-nlp/dashboardread 2026-10-11

Agents reach outside systems through Handover Providers, Connections, Extensions, Code Nodes and the Node Execution API, all credentialed programmatic paths, and act on backend systems through APIs and connectors. Cognigy's own surfaces are Endpoints, a Webchat widget, a Voice Gateway and the Agent Copilot workspace embedded in a contact center console, which are channels the agent speaks through or Cognigy's own interfaces. The agents do not control a browser, desktop or remote computer.

Sourcecognigy.com AI Ops and orchestration page, docs.cognigy.com Node Reference and Extensionsread 2026-09-06

Bots work through API calls, JavaScript code actions and native app integrations, and voicebots handle phone calls with speech recognition and synthesis. Knowledge base AI crawls a page or a whole domain when content is added, which builds the answer store before any conversation takes place. Chatlayer has no hosted browser, remote desktop or screen control, and Sinch's tools for agents built elsewhere work the same way, since the MCP server, Functions and Voice Relay all act through Sinch's own APIs.

Sourcedocs.chatlayer.ai/buildabot/flow-logic/dialog-state/action-bot-dialogread 2026-10-11