What are the best alternatives to PolyAI?

Based on documented capability coverage across the Agentic Index 14 point taxonomy, the closest alternatives to PolyAI among voice agents are Regal, Synthflow, Vapi, Smallest AI. Each is graded on the same public evidence, and no vendor pays for placement.

Does PolyAI support MCP and tool calling?

Full under the Agentic Index verification standard. PolyAI publishes public evidence of Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, tool calling, and API or SDK extensibility for connecting agents to external tools. Evidence basis: A documented API, SDKs and MCP servers for PolyAI's own platform. The Agents API creates and duplicates agents, manages branches, behavior rules, knowledge topics, variants, deployments, numbers, secrets and voices; Conversations, Chat, Mes. Graded from public evidence only against the Agentic Index 14 point capability taxonomy. No vendor pays for placement.

Does PolyAI have SOC 2, SSO and role based access control?

Full under the Agentic Index verification standard. PolyAI publishes public evidence of enterprise security and identity controls, covering a compliance posture such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001, single sign on (SSO or SAML), and role based access control (RBAC). Evidence basis: Access control runs on Admin and Member roles, with each member set to None, Read or Edit per area (Analytics, Behavior, Knowledge, Flows, Tools, Testing, Deployments and others), plus a secrets vault with its own access control; no SSO is. Graded from public evidence only against the Agentic Index 14 point capability taxonomy. No vendor pays for placement.

Does PolyAI give you tracing and observability into agent runs?

Full under the Agentic Index verification standard. PolyAI publishes public evidence of tracing, observability and audit logging into agent runs, so a team can see what an agent did and why. Evidence basis: Run level transcripts with the tools called. 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 conversa. Graded from public evidence only against the Agentic Index 14 point capability taxonomy. No vendor pays for placement.

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PolyAI

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Voice agentindependentVerified 2026-09-28

Entry priceContact for quote; billed per minuteFull pricing detail

PolyAI builds enterprise voice and chat agents on its Raven model or a customer chosen LLM, with retrieval grounded answers, deep contact center integrations, simulation testing and a full API.

PolyAI is an enterprise voice AI company founded in 2017 in London that builds agents to automate high volume customer service calls, for organizations in banking, telecommunications, healthcare, retail, utilities and hospitality. Its own Raven model family is trained on enterprise conversations, and customers can instead choose OpenAI or Amazon Bedrock models, or connect their own model through an OpenAI compatible endpoint.

Agents are built in Agent Studio or in code with the Agent Development Kit, and PolyAI's own team also designs and runs deployments as a managed service. A knowledge base answers from customer content through retrieval, with citations visible in transcripts; flows handle multi step tasks with validated entities and transitions; and tools call the customer's systems, with integrations for Salesforce, Zendesk, Epic, Stripe, PCI Pal, OpenTable and the major contact center platforms. Agents answer calls, place outbound calls through an API, and work over SMS, RCS, email, web chat and mobile SDKs, and a per caller memory keeps preferences and history between conversations.

Simulation tests run scripted caller scenarios and mark each assertion passed or failed, including checks on the backend actions the agent triggered, and can run in CI; transcripts show the tool calls, flow steps and variables behind each turn. Guardrails block jailbreaks, hold the agent to its knowledge and escalate emergencies, and handoffs pass callers to live agents. Access is managed with Admin and Member roles and per area permissions, and PolyAI states ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, HIPAA and Cyber Essentials Plus, with hosting on AWS.

Pricing is per minute of agent use with support, a 99.9 percent SLA and ongoing improvements included, set after a demo rather than published. PolyAI suits large contact centers that want enterprise grade voice agents with deep integrations, testing and governance.

Vendor details

Canonical URL

https://poly.ai

Company status

independent

Use cases & customers

In practice

A bank routes millions of inbound calls to PolyAI, whose assistant authenticates callers, checks balances, and takes payments in natural conversation, escalating only the cases that genuinely need a human agent.

A hospitality group deploys a branded PolyAI assistant that grounds its answers in property specific documents, so callers get accurate, on brand responses about reservations in their own language at any hour.

A contact center team uses PolyAI's Analyst Agents to ask in plain language why certain calls fail, surfacing patterns across interactions that help them refine the assistant and improve outcomes.

Agentic Index coverage score

11.0 / 14 capabilities · 79%

Integrations & Tool Calling	Full
Custom tools plus a named catalog. Agents call customer written tools (functions with state variables, return values and a conversation API client) and API integrations during a call, and documented 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
Workflow Orchestration	Full
Configurable flows with steps and transitions. Flows are built in a no code builder or the ADK from steps, entities with validation, transition functions and advanced steps, triggered from topics or functions, and versioned through branches, diffs and staged environments; 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
Knowledge Grounding & RAG	Full
A maintained knowledge base with retrieval and citations. Knowledge base topics are created, updated and deleted in Agent Studio or through the Knowledge Base API, RAG retrieves from them and from connected external knowledge sources, and transcripts can show the topic citations behind each answer; new knowledge enters by adding a topic or source, not retraining. SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (RAG, External knowledge sources, Knowledge Base API, Studio transcripts)read 2026-09-28
Human Oversight & Guardrails	Partial
Guardrails and escalation, no approval step. 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
Security, Identity & Governance	Full
Access control runs on Admin and Member roles, with each member set to None, Read or Edit per area (Analytics, Behavior, Knowledge, Flows, Tools, Testing, Deployments and others), plus a secrets vault with its own access control; no SSO is documented. Its compliance standards cover ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, HIPAA where applicable, GDPR and Cyber Essentials Plus, with dates not stated. SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Role permissions reference, Compliance standards) and poly.ai/securityread 2026-09-28
Observability & Auditability	Full
Run level transcripts with the tools called. 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, and the Conversations API and S3 export sit beside them. SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Studio transcripts, Conversation review, Alerts API)read 2026-09-28
Memory & State Persistence	Full
Agent memory is a key value store keyed to the caller's phone number, 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 documented. SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Agent memory persistence)read 2026-09-28
Deployment & Data Residency	Not documented
Hosted on AWS with no documented deployment or region choice. The security page says the platform is hosted on AWS, the compliance page names 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, which is legal cover rather than a region a buyer selects; 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
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs	Partial
Patterns the customer assembles, not packaged agents. The Recipes collection offers copy and paste patterns (SMS confirmation, retry with handoff, caller ID validation, intent based routing) described as 'a starting point, not a final implementation', and the ADK tutorials walk through building agents such as a restaurant booking agent; no catalog of adoptable prebuilt agents is published. SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Recipes, ADK tutorials)read 2026-09-28
Triggers & Channel Coverage	Full
Agents answer inbound calls on PolyAI numbers or through SIP and contact center integrations, 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
Model Flexibility & Routing	Full
The customer chooses the model. Voice and chat configuration select among 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), and 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
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility	Full
A documented API, SDKs and MCP servers for PolyAI's own platform. The Agents API creates and duplicates agents, manages branches, behavior rules, knowledge topics, variants, deployments, numbers, secrets and voices; Conversations, Chat, Messaging, Outbound, Webhooks and Alerts APIs sit beside it, with iOS and Android SDKs, the ADK CLI, and Builder and Data MCP servers with documented authentication. SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (API reference introduction, MCP overview)read 2026-09-28
Testing, Debugging & Optimization	Full
An evaluation harness on the customer's agent. 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
Browser & Computer Use	Not documented
No browser, desktop or computer control. PolyAI agents work over voice, SMS, RCS, email, web chat and mobile SDKs and act through tools and APIs; 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

The Agentic Index coverage score grades every vendor Full, Partial or Not documented against the same 14 buyer facing capabilities, from public evidence only. Each capability links to how all vendors in the index score on it. How this evidence is graded

Recent platform changes

2026-09-13·Agent capabilityVerified

PolyAI introduced Wren, a new coding agent designed to autonomously analyze production conversations and recommend improvements to dialog agents. Wren operates in the background using a six-step agentic loop to identify issues, test potential fixes, and present actionable recommendations for users to approve or dismiss.

Bears on: Agent capability

View source

2026-08-05·Observability / auditabilityVerified

PolyAI updated its PolyScore analytics metric by shifting from a 0 to 10 scale to a 1 to 5 scale. The new scoring system is backed by a rubric that natively evaluates voice, messaging, and both inbound and outbound email interactions.

Bears on: Observability / auditability

View source

View all 2 changes for PolyAI →Tracked since Aug 2026 · Verified from public vendor sources

Pricing

Contact for quote; billed per minute

per minute of agent use

Sales call required

Yes, required for paid access

Free / trial

No free plan or trial published

Agentic Index verified 2026-09-28

Official pricing page

Related vendors

Alternatives to PolyAI

The closest documented capability profiles to PolyAI among voice agents tracked by Agentic Index, ordered by similarity on the same 14 point evidence the rankings use. No vendor pays for placement.

Regal10.5 / 14A lighter documented profile than PolyAI
Synthflow12.5 / 14Adds documented Deployment & Data Residency
Vapi11.5 / 14Adds documented Deployment & Data Residency
Smallest AI11.0 / 14Adds documented Deployment & Data Residency
Thoughtly10.0 / 14Adds documented Deployment & Data Residency
Gnani.ai11.5 / 14Adds documented Deployment & Data ResidencyPolyAI vs Gnani.ai →

Similarity is computed from each vendor's Agentic Index coverage score evidence, axis by axis, not from the totals. How this evidence is graded

Compare PolyAI with other vendors →Compare all voice agents →See where PolyAI ranks →

Data confidence: high

Head to head

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