Adding the Twilio Voice Channel¶

To add Twilio Voice as a channel to your Kore.ai assistant, you must get a Twilio phone number and set up a webhook integration to communicate with the virtual assistance (VA).

Before you begin¶

Twilio Voice for assistants is designed to work on voice-based channels. Before you enable Twilio Voice, note the following:

Twilio Voice does not support enterprise virtual assistants that require user authorization to communicate.
Tasks that require the user's authorization to communicate with external systems must not be included.
Webhook Nodes work asynchronously and are not supported on Twilio Voice.
Use only dialog tasks for the best user experience.
Configured responses for Twilio Voice are only brief and plain text messages.
The VA receives the user's voice response from Twilio Voice only after a few moments of silence at the user's end, and this can appear as a lag for the end user.

Prerequisites¶

Create a new Twilio number to associate with your assistant through Log in to your Twilio Voice account link.
Buy a number by going to the Twilio Account Dashboard > Develop > Phone Numbers > Manage > Buy a Number.
Twilio phone number. If you already have a Twilio phone number you want to associate with this VA, you can proceed to the next steps.

Step 1: Configure the Integration in Twilio¶

To set up the integration:

Go to Twilio Account Dashboard > Develop > Phone Numbers > Manage > TwiML Apps and click Create New TwiML App.
Enter a name for the app and copy the Webhook URL from the Configurations tab of the Twilio Voice Channel page (Automation AI > Channels & Flows > Channels > Third Party Voice > All > Twilio Voice) and enter in the Request URL field for the Voice Configuration.
Click Create to complete the app creation.

Step 2: Associate a Phone Number¶

To associate the TwiML App with your Twilio Phone Number:

Go to Twilio Account Dashboard > Develop > Phone Numbers > Manage > Active Numbers.
Select the number you want to associate with the TwiML App from the Active Numbers section.
Select the TwiML App from the Configure With dropdown list in the Voice Configuration section.
The TwiML App field is displayed. Select the app you have configured in the previous steps.
Click Save Configuration to complete this app association.

Step 3: Set Up Agent Transfer (Optional)¶

Optionally, you can also set up Agent Transfer functionality to transfer the user’s call conversation to another Twilio number. To do this, you must configure the Kore.ai Agent Transfer SDK. Download the Agent Transfer SDK from the Kore.ai GitHub repository and define data.message, transferCallToAgent, and agentPhonenumber parameters.

data.message: Define the message to be read out to the end-user when the call is transferred to the agent is initiated.
transferCallToAgent: Set this flag to True to enable Agent Transfer and False to disable.
agentPhonenumber: Provide your Twilio phone number to which the user call conversation is transferred.

Step 4: Enable the Twilio Voice Channel¶

To enable the Twilio Voice Channel:

In the XO Platform, go to Channels & Flows > Channels > Third Party Voice > All > Twilio Voice.
To complete the Channel setup, go to the Configurations tab and pursue the following steps:
1. Enter your Twilio Number to associate with the Kore.ai assistant.
2. Select Yes in the Enable Channel section and then click Save to complete the user creation process and channel activation.
From the Voice Call Properties tab, enter the details to configure the channel-level voice properties. Click here for more details.

For details regarding the configuration of voice properties at the Dialog Task level, refer to Configuring Voice Call Settings for a Node.

After the channel is enabled and all configurations are verified, you can optionally publish the assistant to make it available for end-users with the new channel. Learn more about Publishing your Virtual Assistant.

To learn more about working with Channels within the Kore.ai XO Platform, please see Channel Enablement.