Sinch vs Twilio (2026)

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

Agent Connect gives an agent a tool system built on standard function calling. A developer defines a name, description and JSON schema, and the SDK formats the tool for whichever LLM provider runs the agent. Custom tools are written with a decorator in Python or defineTool in TypeScript and can read the session, the customer profile and the channel.

Three tools come built in, knowledge search over Enterprise Knowledge, memory retrieval and escalation to a Studio flow that can route into Flex. Because each tool is the customer's own code, the agent can act in any system the customer can reach, and Twilio's own messaging, voice, email and Verify APIs sit alongside as further actions.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/conversations/agent-connect/core-conceptsread 2026-10-11

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

Conversation Orchestrator joins voice calls, SMS and WhatsApp messages into one threaded conversation tied to a customer profile, with a lifecycle that moves each conversation from open to inactive to closed on timeouts the customer sets. Studio, Twilio's visual flow builder, runs multistep communication workflows and receives the agent's handoff payload, and Flex routes the conversation to a person with the history attached. The reasoning inside the agent stays in the customer's own code, while the movement of a conversation between channels, the agent, flows and people runs on Twilio.

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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

Inbound voice calls, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS and web chat all reach the agent through one shared callback, so a single handler serves every channel. Webhooks and WebSocket connections carry the events, and Conversation Relay streams a live phone call to the agent with speech recognition and synthesis handled by Twilio. Outbound sends and calls start from the REST APIs, and Studio flows start on incoming calls, messages or API requests, which covers inbound, event driven and programmatic starts across the channels a contact center uses.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/conversations/agent-connect/core-conceptsread 2026-10-11

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

Enterprise Knowledge stores a company's policies, documents and reference material as knowledge bases that agents and human agents search for grounded answers. It is billed as a persistent store, $0.018 per GB hour of storage and $0.005 per retrieval, and Agent Connect exposes it as a knowledge search tool the agent calls when a customer asks a question, returning matching passages for the reply. Customer profiles live separately in Conversation Memory.

Sourcetwilio.com/en-us/products/conversational-ai/pricingread 2026-10-11

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

Conversation Memory keeps one profile per customer inside a memory store. Each profile holds conversational memory, the observations and summaries extracted automatically after each conversation closes, and factual memory, the traits and identifiers that describe the customer. New observations are added, merged with an existing one when they add detail, replace it when they contradict it, or are discarded when they lack support, so the profile stays current.

A Recall API returns the most relevant observations, summaries and recent messages by semantic and lexical search, and Agent Connect calls it on every messaging turn. Up to five stores separate data such as sandbox and production, each profile holds up to 500 observations and 500 summaries, and observations can be switched off per configuration. Memories carry no fixed retention period and persist until they are reconciled, edited or removed.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/conversations/memory/conversation-memory-conceptsread 2026-10-11

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

The built in escalation tool hands a conversation to a Studio flow and on to a Flex agent with full context, on voice after the agent's last reply plays and on digital channels by posting straight to the flow. When and why to escalate is the customer's code to decide, and Agent Connect makes no decisions about what the agent does.

Conversation Memory applies a prompt exclusion meant to screen out GDPR special category data. Agent Identity adds scoped, revocable tokens and human approval over SMS or RCS before a high risk action, but it is in private release, so approval before each action is not yet open to every customer.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/conversations/agent-connect/core-conceptsread 2026-10-11

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

Twilio Console sign in works through a corporate identity provider over SAML 2.0, with SP and IdP initiated login and multiple SSO profiles, on Twilio Editions that include single sign on. Which accounts a user can open and which role they hold are set in the Console and Admin Center, and Flex maps identity provider roles to its own.

Twilio holds ISO/IEC 27001 certification and is audited externally on a regular cycle, with security and privacy reports available on request through security.twilio.com. Agent Connect and Conversation Memory are not HIPAA eligible or PCI compliant, so regulated workflows sit outside them.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/iam/single-sign-onread 2026-10-11

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

Conversation Orchestrator stores every message and transcribed call as a threaded conversation linked to a profile, Conversation Memory shows the observations and summaries it extracted, and Conversation Intelligence analyzes each conversation for sentiment, summaries and custom criteria. Agent Connect logs a warning when it falls back from the Memory API. Together that shows what was said and what the system learned. The tool calls and reasoning live in the customer's agent, so a step by step trace of a run comes from the customer's own logging.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/conversations/memoryread 2026-10-11

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

The agent and its model run wherever the customer hosts them, since Agent Connect is an SDK inside the customer's own application. Twilio's isolated regions are US1 in the eastern United States, IE1 in Dublin and AU1 in Sydney, and a customer chooses one to keep a workload's data there.

Voice, SIP trunking and messaging run in Dublin, and voice in Sydney, while Conversation Memory, Orchestrator, Enterprise Knowledge and Conversation Relay are offered in the US region only, so the agent layer runs in the US. While regions roll out, Twilio does not guarantee that all data stays in the selected region.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/global-infrastructure/regional-product-and-feature-availabilityread 2026-10-11

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

Agent Connect starts from a quickstart and integration guides for AWS Bedrock and Microsoft Foundry, Conversation Intelligence ships Twilio authored language operators alongside custom ones, and Twilio Skills and the Code Exchange give developers guided patterns and sample apps. Each of these is a starting point the customer builds on. Twilio does not offer finished agents for support, sales or scheduling that a customer switches on.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/conversations/agent-connectread 2026-10-11

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 customer picks the model. Agent Connect does not run inference. The customer supplies the LLM application and controls how it responds, with integration guides for AWS Bedrock and Microsoft Foundry and support for OpenAI or any other provider. Tools are formatted for whichever provider the customer uses, so switching models is a change in the customer's own code. Twilio's own generative features, such as observation extraction in Conversation Memory, run on models Twilio chooses.

Sourcetwilio.com/docs/conversations/agent-connectread 2026-10-11

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

Every product has a public REST API and helper libraries, including a Conversation Memory API with profile, trait, observation, summary, import and Recall endpoints. Agent Connect itself is an SDK for Python and TypeScript with a FastAPI server for webhooks and WebSockets. An MCP server gives coding agents semantic search across more than 1,500 endpoints in over 30 products, and Twilio Skills package product guidance for AI coding tools.

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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

Conversation Intelligence runs language operators over voice and messaging conversations, Twilio authored ones for sentiment and summaries and custom ones written as natural language prompts, which a team can point at its AI agent's conversations to flag compliance misses or missed upsells. That reviews live traffic after the fact. The Agent Connect quickstart builds and tests an application locally, and there is no suite of saved test cases with pass or fail results to run against a new version of an agent before it goes live.

Sourcetwilio.com/en-us/products/conversational-ai/pricingread 2026-10-11

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

The agent layer connects an agent to communication channels, customer memory and knowledge through APIs and tools the customer writes. No hosted browser, remote desktop or interface control is part of it. An agent that has to work inside a web page or a desktop application brings that capability as a custom tool in the customer's own code, outside anything Twilio runs.

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