2025.3 release

Virtual Assitant

General Availability Features

Knowledge AI 

Knowledge AI solution allows users to configure Knowledge Base in AI Studio and plug it with a Virtual Assistant (designed in AI Studio) to enable automated Q&A handling. As a result, Knowledge AI empowers two use cases:

• Intentless conversations: Virtual Assistant (VA) can directly answer customer questions without intent definitions in VA (intent definition means pre-defined questions and responses included in VA flow).

• Conversation digressions: VAs can flexibly handle customers’ clarification questions during the middle of an ongoing automated conversation and return to the digression point.

For businesses seeking to enhance customer engagement through intelligent virtual assistants, Knowledge AI provides three key benefits:

• Cost efficiency and scalability — it reduces the expense and complexity of designing, building and maintaining virtual assistants by streamlining the entire lifecycle.

• Enhanced customer experience – it delivers more natural, accurate, and complete conversations by anticipating customer needs and continuously improving dialogue design.

• Unified and reliable knowledge – it consolidates scattered information from multiple systems, ensuring updates are tracked automatically and customers always receive accurate, up-to-date answers.

Knowledge AI is based on Vonage’s in-built Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) APIs and is a combination of Knowledge Base, Semantic Search, and LLM response generation, all of which are configurable through AI Studio’s no-code interface. To enable easy integration with the existing virtual assistants, Knowledge AI supports all the languages offered via the Hybrid NLU and Traditional NLU engine in Vonage AI Studio.

Hybrid NLU

Virtual Assistants built on Vonage AI Studio now offer two AI engines:

• Hybrid NLU engine that combines rule-based logic with transformer-based models from Google Gemini to interpret user input

• Traditional NLU engine, which is the pre-existing NLU built on rule-based systems, keyword matching, and statistical techniques

Hybrid NLU engine enhances both intent recognition and entity extraction by leveraging contextual understanding and semantic nuance, rather than relying solely on predefined patterns. As a result, Hybrid NLU offers the below benefits:

• Boosts performance: Up to 20% better intent detection and improved entity extraction, leading to higher Virtual Assistant containment rates and fewer human escalations — which means smoother experiences and real cost savings.

• Reduces manual effort: Needs less training data because it can handle variability/synonyms in user utterances; further, it has a limited need of hierarchical classification trees due to better performance

• Handle custom requirements with ease: Enables configuration of Custom Entity using your own business rules via LLM prompting; also, Closed Lists (up to 1,000 values) with fuzzy/exact match can be used in Custom entity to unlock new use cases

Hybrid NLU supports all the existing features of Traditional NLU, including Intent Annotation, Intent Ambiguation, System Entities, Entity Ambiguation, and Multi-value parameters.

Hybrid NLU fully supports (GA level) these 18 languages:

• English

• German

• Dutch

• French

• Spanish

• Portuguese

• Italian

• Indonesian

• Swedish

• Japanese

• Arabic

• Korean

• Polish

• Thai

• Hebrew

• Finnish

• Danish

• Norwegian

Customers can choose the Hybrid NLU engine in three different ways:

• New agent creation

• Agent duplication

• Importing agent

In addition, customers can also migrate from Traditional NLU engine to Hybrid NLU engine by following the following steps:

• Create duplicates of existing live VAs and select “Hybrid NLU” AI engine in the duplicate agent screen.

• For intents:

  • Retain existing user expressions and classification nodes if you want to minimize change effort ... OR

  • Update user expressions and change hierarchical classification to leverage Hybrid NLU’s new capabilities

• For entities:

  • Use existing system entities OR

  • Create new custom entities leveraging the increased flexibility of Hybrid NLU

• Use the VA tester to check the classification/entity extraction results and & compare Hybrid NLU vs Traditional NLU performance

Vonage Business Communications

Bulk SMS

Bulk SMS is a new feature that allows you to send a single SMS message to multiple recipients simultaneously — extending VBC’s existing one-to-one SMS into one-to-many messaging.

It’s perfect for businesses that need to share time-sensitive updates, promotions, or alerts. Bulk SMS ensures your customers receive the right information, at the right time, via their preferred channel.

Dynamic Outbound Caller ID

The Dynamic Outbound Caller ID capability within VBC Apps Calling gives organizations precise control over the identity presented on outbound calls. Whether that be a corporate mainline, a regional or department number, or an individual extension. Built for scale and governed centrally, the feature supports global numbering strategies, regulatory and compliance requirements, and role-based policies. Admins can control the accessibility of this feature by the end users.

AI Transcription

VBC’s new AI Transcription delivers high-quality, time-stamped transcriptions and concise AI-generated summaries for both Company (automatic/continuous recording) and On-Demand Call Recordings (user initiated).

Every recording is processed to produce a searchable transcript with speaker separation and timestamps, plus a distilled executive summary that surfaces the conversation’s key points, action items, sentiment, and follow-ups.

Concurrent sessions limit & 90 days inactive logout

To strengthen fraud prevention and user security in VBC, we’re introducing new session management policies. These include updated concurrent session limits across Admin, Desktop/Web, and Mobile apps, as well as automatic logout for inactive sessions after 90 days. Together, these changes help reduce risks from excessive or unattended sessions while ensuring a more secure user experience.

Vonage Contact Center

Important Updates

Update to Agent Activities data retention through Insights Stats API

Today, our Insights Stats API provides you access to Agent Activities data going back to its launch. For most customers, this covers the full history of their account since joining, though if you became a customer before 2018, only data from that point onward is available.

Starting January 2026, this will change. Going forward, the Agent Activities endpoints will provide access to the last two years of data on a rolling basis. If you need to look back further, you’ll still be able to access older data through Historical Analytics.

We recommend reviewing any existing API integrations or reporting processes ahead of this change to ensure a smooth transition.

Announcement to Announcer conversion

As part of the continued modernization of our interaction architect we are converting all of the “Announcement” applets to “Announcers.” All the settings, including uploaded audio files, of the Announcement will automatically be migrated to the new applet.

Vonage Contact Center Administration

Centralized schedules; Supervisor permissions

We have added supervisor permissions for centralized schedules, allowing an admin to be able to set whether the supervisor has access to “Read All” and “Modify All,” as well as the option to not view the schedules at all.

Group-based agent states

In this release, we’ve extended the group section in user administration so that customer admins and supervisors can select which global presence states apply to each agent group — with agents in multiple groups inheriting the union of those states and account-level defaults automatically enabled for new groups.

We’ve updated the Agents API to honor these selections, exposing only the chosen presences, while always including “Ready” and “Logged out,” which appear greyed out in the UI.

Permissions and access levels remain unchanged, and the feature is supported in both ContactPad and Intelligent Workspace.

Additionally, supervisors can now reorder minor states alphabetically, user counts are displayed as Users (12) instead of 12 Users, and state-selection summaries show (all) when every state is selected or (1/12) when one of 12 is chosen.

Quick Voice Messages

Following customer requests, we have introduced a new feature that allows agents to play a recorded message during calls. Similar to Voicemail Drop, agents can record a message or upload a recording.

During the call, the agent can press a button, and the recording will be played to both the agent and the customer. This feature is ideally suited to financial services or healthcare, when required information needs to be said by the agent on a regular basis.

Enforce Admin SSO Access

Previously, Single Sign-On (SSO) was supported only for non-admin users.

With this release, Vonage has extended Enforced SSO support to include administrator accounts as well. This enhancement improves feasibility by providing a consistent and centralized login experience for all user roles, simplifying access management, and strengthening security.

To enable this feature, navigate to Account Settings–Single Sign-on page.

Support Google Workspace SSO

Vonage Contact Center (VCC) now supports Google Workspace Single Sign-On (SSO) using the OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocol, allowing users to log in with their Google Workspace accounts for a seamless and secure authentication experience. Customers can configure this option by navigating to the SSO tab under the Account Settings configuration page.

Admin Portal UI Changes (Empty Screen, System Alerts)

We’re rolling out the next set of improvements in our VCC Admin Portal redesign, aimed at making your day-to-day navigation clearer and more consistent.

In this release, you’ll notice:

• Unified system alerts: System notifications now follow the same design and placement, so important updates are easier to notice and interpret.

• Refreshed empty states: New visualizations for empty screens provide guidance and context when no data is available, creating a cleaner and more helpful experience.

These changes are part of our broader effort to deliver a predictable, streamlined experience across the Admin Portal — minimizing friction and reducing the learning curve for all users.

We’ll continue to build on this foundation with more updates in upcoming releases.

Interaction Architect

Outbound IVR

Outbound calling just got more flexible. With the new “Default Outbound” plan type in IPM, admins can configure an interaction plan that will trigger between when the agent dials and before a call connects to the end customer. This makes it possible to:

• Complete data dips into linked CRMs or external systems

• Present a local number based on customer location

• Apply call recording settings

• Check against “do not call” lists

• Provide announcements to agents before the call dials out or if the call is dropped before dialing

• Launch post-call surveys for outbound calls

• Register the call with external branding services such as Hiya and First Orion

Customers can start with one outbound interaction plan for all agents. Outbound plans will support the same powerful features as inbound flows, along with a new applet tailored specifically for outbound scenarios, “Alert contact.” This applet will allow admins to set the following details:

• Presented address: Allows the admin to dynamically or statically set the telephone number presented to the customer. If left blank, the outbound number selected at dial will be used, and if the dynamic address set is blank or does not exist in the system, the same rule will be applied.

• To address: The customer's number to be dialed allows the admin to update the dialed number. If this field is left blank, then the number dialed will be used.

The “Alert contact” applet also has the option to set which applets run when either the agent or the customer ends the call first. This setting is known as the “next applet” and is commonly used to configure post-call surveys on outbound calls.

Applet Update: Dynamic Data Sources in Send Email Applet

The Send Email applet has been upgraded to support dynamic content, enabling more flexible and personalized communications. Key changes include: