Integrating with phone

You can enable the streaming feature in conversational search for the phone integrations in your assistant. This helps your assistant to stream the responses while generating them. For more information see, Conversational search.

Adding the phone integration to your assistant makes your assistant available to customers over the phone.

If an end user asks to speak to a person, the phone integration can transfer the call to an agent. Supported live agent and contact center integrations:

Genesys
Twilio Flex
NICE CXone
Bring your own

There are several ways to add the phone integration to your assistant:

You can connect to a contact center with live agents. For more information about setting up the integration, see Integrating with phone and NICE CXone contact center.
You can use and connect an existing number by configuring a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunk from a provider such as Genesys or Twilio.

A SIP trunk is equivalent to an analog telephone line, except it uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to transmit voice data and can support multiple concurrent calls. The trunk can connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or your company's on-premises private branch exchange (PBX).

When a customer makes a phone call using the telephone number connected to your assistant, the phone integration makes it possible for your assistant to answer. The integration converts output from your assistant into voice audio by using the IBM Watson™ Text to Speech service, and the audio is sent to the telephone network through the SIP trunk. When the customer replies, the voice input is converted into text by using the IBM Watson™ Speech to Text service.

Depending on the architecture of your existing telephony infrastructure, there are multiple ways you might integrate it with watsonx Assistant. For more information about common integration patterns, read the blog post Hey Watson, can I have your number? on Medium.

Set up the integration

You must have Manager role access to the instance and Viewer role access to the resource group to complete setup. For more information about access levels, see Managing access.

To set up the integration:

In the Integrations section on the main page for your assistant under Essential Channels, you will see a tile for Phone.
On the Phone tile, click Add.
On the pop-up window, click Add again.
Choose whether to integrate with your contact center or connect to an existing SIP trunk:
- To integrate with a contact center, click Integrate with your contact center.
- To use an existing phone number you have already configured with a SIP trunk provider, click Use an existing phone number with an external provider.
Click Next.
If you are integrating with a contact center, follow the instructions to configure the contact center:
1. On the Select contact center page, select the tile of the connect center you would like to use.
2. On the Connect to contact center page, enter the required information. There is a Test Connection button on the page to validate the connection. Click Next.
If you are using an existing phone number, follow the instructions to configure the SIP trunk:
1. On the Bring your own SIP trunk page, copy the SIP URI and assign it to your SIP trunk. Click Next.
On the Phone number page (only for Integrate with your contact center and Use an existing phone number with an external provider), specify the phone number of the SIP trunk. Specify the number by using the international phone number format: +1 958 555 0123. Do not surround the area code with parentheses.

Currently, only one primary phone number can be added during initial setup of the phone integration. You can add more phone numbers in the phone integration settings later.

Click Next.

The phone integration setup is now complete. On the Phone page, you can click the tabs to view or edit the phone integration.

Adding more phone numbers

If you are using existing phone numbers you configured via a SIP trunk provider, you can add multiple numbers to the same phone integration.

To add more phone numbers:

In the phone integration settings, go to the Phone number tab.
Use one of the following methods:
- To add phone numbers one by one, click Add phone number in the table, and enter the phone number along with an optional description. Click the Add button to save the number.
- To import a set of phone numbers that are stored in a comma-separated values (CSV) file, click the Upload a CSV file icon , and then find the CSV file that contains the list of phone numbers.
  
  The phone numbers you upload will replace any existing numbers in the table.

Setting up live agent escalation

If you want your assistant to be able to transfer a conversation to a live agent, you can connect your phone integration to a contact center. For more information, see instructions for the supported platform: