PolyAI vs SoundHound (2026)

Agents call customer written tools, which are functions with state variables, return values and a conversation API client, and API integrations during a call. Integrations include Salesforce, Zendesk ticketing, Epic EHR, Stripe, PCI Pal, OpenTable, Tripleseat, HotSOS, Gladly and Google Sheets, with contact center handoff to Genesys, NICE CXone, Five9, Amazon Connect and others.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Tools introduction, Integrations overview)read 2026-09-28

Amelia 7 ships an expanded library of third-party integrations and pre-built connectors that let agents retrieve enterprise application data via APIs and execute actions. Banking deployments integrate with core banking systems for account inquiries, loan applications, transfers and card management, and healthcare deployments integrate with Epic.

In voice commerce, drivers order takeout, reserve restaurants through OpenTable, pay for parking through Parkopedia, and reach calendar, email and messaging over MCP to book meetings, so the agent completes transactions in outside systems. Agents consume MCP servers outward as tool calls, and the platform also hosts MCP and A2A agents inside it.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 release, CES 2026 announcement and solution pagesread 2026-09-06

Flows are built in a no code builder or the ADK from steps, entities with validation, transition functions and advanced steps. They are triggered from topics or functions and versioned through branches, diffs and staged environments, and the recipes include a retry counter that escalates after failures.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Flows introduction, Triggering flows, Transition functions, Environments)read 2026-09-28

Agentic+ is a proprietary multi-process framework at the core of Amelia 7. It lets businesses deploy fleets of goal-oriented agents and handles a complex query by orchestrating multiple agents, each with a specific function, to resolve it by text or voice without human intervention.

It moves between generative flows, where a probabilistic engine synthesizes from data, and deterministic rules-based flows that guarantee consistent results, which SoundHound describes as essential in financial, legal and other high-precision transactions, so a deterministic path can sit inside an agentic run.

Workflows carry a human-in-the-loop mechanism as a defined step, and the framework orchestrates across models, deterministic flows and integrations together.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 blog and press releaseread 2026-09-06

Agents answer inbound calls on PolyAI numbers or through SIP and contact center integrations, and an API triggers outbound calls. Inbound SMS, RCS, email and web chat reach the agent, and external events post results into running conversations.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Outbound calling setup, Trigger outbound call API, SMS deployment, Email integration)read 2026-09-28

A single agent configuration serves phone, web chat, SMS and messaging apps from the same knowledge base in more than a hundred languages, and one hotel agent, for example, runs across marketing, reservations and on-property concierge over all four. Beyond the contact center, the same platform reaches into vehicles, TVs and smart devices, so work arrives from an embedded assistant in a car as readily as from a web widget, each an independent inbound queue. No event catalog, schedule or webhook trigger is published, and work starts when an inbound contact arrives on one of these paths.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 release, platform overview and CES 2026 announcementread 2026-09-06

Knowledge base topics are created, updated and deleted in Agent Studio or through the Knowledge Base API, and RAG retrieves from them and from connected external knowledge sources. Transcripts can show the topic citations behind each answer, and new knowledge enters by adding a topic or source, not by retraining.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (RAG, External knowledge sources, Knowledge Base API, Studio transcripts)read 2026-09-28

Tailored answer libraries can be built for an agent, either through a Q&A format that returns precise answers or by uploading files, websites and other knowledge sources to support model-generated answers, so agents respond dynamically to questions nobody scripted.

Amelia 7.1 lists improved knowledge retrieval and fine-tuned matching algorithms among its accuracy gains and improved retrieval again among its latency gains. Businesses define the specific knowledge and functions needed to execute a task, domain-specific content ships per industry, and the same knowledge base serves web chat, SMS and voice.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 blog and Amelia 7.1 releaseread 2026-09-06

Agent memory is a key value store keyed to the caller's phone number. It is read at the start of each turn and written at the end of a conversation for declared state keys, holding data such as preferences and booking history between conversations, and it expires at the end of the contracted retention period. No manual per caller delete path is described.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Agent memory persistence)read 2026-09-28

Agents handle complex multi-turn interactions with context held across the exchange, and Amelia 7.1 makes agents more context-aware through process-specific instructions and improved retrieval. The platform maintains a conversation across phone, web, text and messaging, so a single interaction can move channel without restarting. No memory layer with a stated scope and lifetime is described.

Nothing says what an agent retains about a person between separate contacts, whether memory is scoped per user, per account or per workflow, how long it lives, or how an operator inspects or clears it. The answer libraries and uploaded knowledge sources are a corpus, and the execution histories are a log.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.1 release and platform pagesread 2026-09-06

Five platform guardrails block jailbreaks, hold the agent to its knowledge base, filter unsafe content and escalate at once on emergencies, and handoff actions pass callers to live agents with state. No action waits for a person's sign off before it commits.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Safety guardrails, Handoff actions)read 2026-09-28

Layered guardrails, confidence checks, safe fallbacks and human escalation work together, and agents are grounded in customer system data and never guess. Agentic+ workflows include a human-in-the-loop mechanism to ensure personal oversight when required.

Escalation teams and queues are configured, human representatives handling escalated conversations are managed, canned response templates are prepared, and an Agent Console gives the person a companion AI that listens to live conversations and offers responses, offers or guidance. For telecom, a smart human-in-the-loop escalates across the full spectrum from simple queries to complex multi-step resolutions.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 blog, platform and telecom solution pagesread 2026-09-06

Access control runs on Admin and Member roles, with each member set to None, Read or Edit per area, such as Analytics, Behavior, Knowledge, Flows, Tools, Testing and Deployments, plus a secrets vault with its own access control. No SSO is described. Compliance standards cover ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, HIPAA where applicable, GDPR and Cyber Essentials Plus, with no dates given.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Role permissions reference, Compliance standards) and poly.ai/securityread 2026-09-28

Customers manage their own password complexity and SSO/SAML 2.0 requirements, so identity integrates through the customer's provider, and Amelia follows set practices for identifying and authenticating users accessing its systems.

Amelia states compliance with ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS 3.2.1 and the HIPAA Safeguard Rule, with independent auditors reviewing HIPAA and GDPR compliance and a certifications page on the Amelia domain. Healthcare deployments are positioned as HIPAA-compliant agents integrated with Epic.

Data moves over TLS 1.2 or higher and rests under AWS KMS with FIPS 140-2 validated modules, customer data is returned or destroyed on request, and no customer data is shared across clients.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia data processing agreement, platform and solution pagesread 2026-09-06

Studio transcripts carry timestamped turns and audio, with toggles for tool calls, topic citations, flows and steps, and variables. Structured logging from functions, diagnostic layers in conversation review, alert rules, the Conversations API and S3 export sit beside them.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Studio transcripts, Conversation review, Alerts API)read 2026-09-28

Amelia 7.1 adds scripting tools to access AI agent execution histories, under transparency, one of its four headline improvement areas, to give enterprises deeper control, visibility and compliance in complex deployments. An execution history records what a specific agent did on a specific run and in what order. The build interface also has analytics tooling and an AI companion that answers questions while building. SoundHound describes no record of why an agent chose one path over another. No retention period or export format is published.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.1 release and Amelia 7.0 releaseread 2026-09-06

The platform is hosted on AWS, with no deployment or region choice. The compliance standards name no data residency region, and the privacy policy's transfers between the United States, the EEA and the UK rest on contractual clauses and adequacy. Staged environments are release stages, and S3 export copies call data out.

SourcePolyAI, poly.ai/security, docs.poly.ai (Compliance standards) and poly.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-28

Customers can host Amelia in their own private cloud as an alternative to the SaaS model, and SoundHound has customers doing this today.

Amelia 7.1 adds support for custom on-premise LLMs, so the inference layer can also sit inside the customer's estate, and the agentic stack has been shown running entirely on the edge inside a vehicle with NVIDIA, alongside deployment embedded in TVs and smart devices.

The default remains SoundHound-managed hosting on AWS, with Amelia holding administrative control of its virtual servers. No region selector or named residency jurisdiction is published for the SaaS mode.

Sourcesoundhound.com financial services solution FAQ, Amelia 7.1 release, Amelia DPAread 2026-09-06

The Recipes collection offers copy and paste patterns such as SMS confirmation, retry with handoff, caller ID validation and intent based routing, presented as a starting point. ADK tutorials walk through building agents such as a restaurant booking agent, and no catalog of prebuilt agents ready to adopt is published.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Recipes, ADK tutorials)read 2026-09-28

Each member of the named product line does its own job. Smart Answering handles inbound calls, Smart Ordering and Dynamic Drive-Thru automate restaurant ordering across channels, Employee Assist gives staff hands-free access to manuals and training, Autonomics automates IT operations, and Sales Assist supports retail floor staff during live conversations.

Each remains a whole product without the others. Beneath them sits a library of business-ready presets for building agents that fully automate familiar tasks such as password resets and reorders, plus domain-specific content per industry and canned response templates for human representatives.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 blog, platform overview and solution pagesread 2026-09-06

Customers choose the model for voice and chat from PolyAI's own Raven family, OpenAI models (GPT-5.2, GPT-5 mini and nano, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o) and Amazon Bedrock models (Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, Nova Micro). Bring Your Own Model connects any endpoint on the OpenAI chat completions schema with an API key or bearer token.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (LLM model selection, Bring your own model)read 2026-09-28

The customer chooses the model. Amelia's LLM-agnostic architecture lets the customer use the best model for the job, whether a public model, a private model or a combination, which SoundHound presents as a key strategic advantage that prevents vendor lock-in.

Amelia 7.1 extends the choice to models the customer hosts, adding support for custom on-premise LLMs, and where fine-tuning is pursued it runs through the LLM provider's own infrastructure with the configuration dedicated to the customer's account. LLM agnostic is a platform pillar of Amelia 7.0, repeated in earnings commentary, and Agentic+ orchestrates across models rather than binding to one. The choice spans public, private and self-hosted models.

Sourcesoundhound.com financial services and telecom solution FAQs, Amelia 7.0 and 7.1 releasesread 2026-09-06

The Agents API creates and duplicates agents and manages branches, behavior rules, knowledge topics, variants, deployments, numbers, secrets and voices. Conversations, Chat, Messaging, Outbound, Webhooks and Alerts APIs sit beside it, along with iOS and Android SDKs, the ADK CLI, and authenticated Builder and Data MCP servers for PolyAI's own platform.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (API reference introduction, MCP overview)read 2026-09-28

Amelia 7 can host any agent optimized for MCP and A2A, so enterprises and OEMs run self-built agents, SoundHound's prebuilt agents or agents from outside the SoundHound ecosystem together in one environment, and Amelia 7.1 adds scripting tools that reach agent execution histories. Agents also consume MCP servers outward for calendar, email and messaging. No outside caller is described driving the platform itself.

Consuming MCP servers is Amelia reaching out to other systems, and hosting third-party agents means Amelia runs somebody else's agent inside itself. A2A works in both directions, but there is no agent card for SoundHound's own agents, no endpoint or auth scheme, and no API reference, SDK or developer portal.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 and 7.1 releasesread 2026-09-06

Simulation tests describe a caller scenario, generate the caller's turns and mark each assertion passed or failed, including system actions that check the backend operations the agent triggered. Tests run before publishing and in CI through the API, and A/B testing compares variants on live traffic.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Simulation tests, CI automation, A/B testing)read 2026-09-28

There is no evaluation harness, no scored test cases, no quality gate in a release path and no controlled post-deployment experiment. Nothing describes previewing an agent against defined conversations before it goes live, versioning a configuration, rolling one back, or comparing a change against a control. The platform offers build-time analytics and an AI companion answering questions while building, and execution histories reachable by scripting form the run record. Amelia 7.1 reports accuracy and latency improvements as SoundHound's own results, not as something a customer can run.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 and 7.1 releases and platform pagesread 2026-09-06

PolyAI agents work over voice, SMS, RCS, email, web chat and mobile SDKs and act through tools and APIs, with no browser, desktop or computer control. DTMF input collection reads a caller's keypad, not an interface the agent operates.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (llms.txt, DTMF input collection)read 2026-09-28

No browser, desktop or remote computer control is described. Agents reach outside systems through pre-built connectors, enterprise APIs and MCP servers, and their surfaces are voice, chat, SMS and messaging plus embedded assistants in vehicles, TVs and devices, all channels the agent speaks through. Vision AI, shown at CES, pairs a vehicle camera's real-time perception with the voice stack so the assistant can see and interpret the driver's surroundings, which is perception of the physical world, not operation of a software interface.

Sourcesoundhound.com Amelia 7.0 release and CES 2026 announcementread 2026-09-06