Recently released in 2026.2

Virtual Assistant

Agentic NLU in Vonage VA: A Next-Generation AI Engine for Natural Interactions

Your customers can now have natural, free-flowing conversations with your Virtual Assistant. Agentic NLU removes the rigid scripting that caused frustration and unnecessary agent escalations.

Key Capabilities

• Natural, free-flowing dialogue: Your customers speak naturally without following scripted paths or specific phrasing. The LLM-powered engine understands intent regardless of exact wording, sentence structure, or conversational style. "What's my balance?", "How much do I have?", and "Can you tell me my account balance?" are all understood as the same request.

• Multi-parameter capture from single utterances: Extract multiple pieces of information from natural speech in one turn. When your customer says "I want to fly to London tomorrow morning," Agentic NLU captures intent (book flight), destination (London), and time preference (tomorrow morning) without sequential prompting, reducing interaction length and improving customer experience.

• Dynamic context switching: If your customers change topics mid-conversation ("Actually, instead of booking a flight, I need to report my card stolen"), Agentic NLU recognizes the context shift and transitions smoothly without forcing callers to start over or navigate back through menus. The VA adapts to changing caller needs in real time.

• Automatic contextual responses (Agentic Responses): The system generates appropriate replies to ambiguous inputs or requests for clarification without administrators manually scripting every possible dialog path. If your customer provides incomplete information, the VA asks intelligent follow-up questions. If your customer seems confused, the VA offers helpful guidance – all automatically generated based on conversation context.

• Proactive frustration detection and escalation: Agentic NLU monitors conversation patterns to detect when your customers are struggling, confused, or frustrated, even if they haven't explicitly requested an agent. The system can automatically trigger escalation paths before frustration intensifies, improving satisfaction and reducing negative experiences.

Simplified VA Development

Intent-driven hub-and-spoke architecture: Agentic NLU simplifies VA design from complex decision trees to streamlined "hub-and-spoke" flows using just two primary node types:

• Agentic Classification nodes: Identify your customers' intent from natural language input using LLM understanding rather than manually trained classifiers requiring hundreds of sample phrases.

• Agentic Capture nodes: Gather required information (parameters) from conversational input, extracting multiple details from single utterances when provided naturally. This architectural simplification makes VAs easier to design, maintain, and modify compared to traditional decision-tree flows with dozens of branching paths.

Natural language definitions instead of training data: Define intents and parameters using plain language descriptions (prompts) rather than creating extensive training datasets:

• Traditional NLU approach (manual):

  • Intent: "Check Balance".

  • Training phrases: "What's my balance?", "How much money do I have?", "Can you tell me my account balance?", "I want to check my balance", "Show me my balance", [+ 95 more variations].

• Agentic NLU approach (prompt-based):

  • Intent: "Check Balance".

  • Description: "The caller wants to know their current account balance or available funds".

  • LLM automatically understands all natural variations.

This prompt-based approach dramatically reduces development time and makes VAs more robust to natural language variation without exhaustive manual training. Agentic NLU template for quick start: A pre-built VA template optimized for Agentic NLU architecture is available in AI Studio, providing a starting foundation with best practices built in.

VA Historical Analytics: Unlock Deep Insights into Virtual Assistant Performance

Stop guessing why your Virtual Assistant escalates calls, new historical analytics dashboards give you root-cause answers in minutes, showing exactly which intents, parameters, or conversation points are causing failures.

Key Capabilities

Pre-built analytical views: Access five specialized dashboards providing comprehensive VA performance visibility:

• Engagement Metrics Dashboard: Overall VA health assessment including:

  • Total sessions, completion rates, escalation rates, abandonment rates.

  • Average session duration, session volume trends over time.

• Intents Dashboard: Analyze intent-level performance to identify problematic or high-value intents:

  • Which intents are invoked most frequently?

  • Which intents correlate with high escalation rates?

  • Which intents show high abandonment during execution?

  • Intent success rates and duration patterns.

• Parameters Dashboard: Understand data collection effectiveness:

  • Which parameters fail to capture correctly?

  • How many retry attempts are required per parameter?

  • Which parameters take the longest to collect?

  • Parameter validation failure rates.

• Tags Dashboard: Track custom intermediate outcomes and task completion:

  • Which tagged tasks complete most frequently?

  • At what point in sessions do specific tags occur?

  • How do tagged intermediate outcomes correlate with final session results?

• Knowledge AI Dashboard: Assess Knowledge AI component performance (if applicable):

  • Knowledge article retrieval accuracy.

  • Article relevance ratings.

  • Knowledge coverage gaps.

Root Cause Analysis Capabilities

Drill-down investigation: Start with high-level dashboard metrics, then drill into specific performance drivers.

Correlation analysis: Identify relationships between VA design elements and session outcomes:

• Which intents or intent sequences correlate with longer session durations?

• Do sessions with specific parameter capture patterns show higher success rates?

• Which conversation paths lead to abandonment vs. completion.

Session Explorer

Individual session investigation: View detailed logs for specific sessions to understand exactly what happened:

• Complete conversation transcript or interaction log.

• Intent invocations and parameter captures in sequence.

• Success/failure indicators at each step.

• Final outcome (completion, escalation, abandonment).

• Session duration and timing details.

Global Filtering

• Cross-dashboard data slicing: Apply filters affecting all dashboards simultaneously to isolate specific trends.

• Time frame: Analyze performance for specific date ranges (last 24 hours, last week, last month, custom range).

• Time zone: View data in specific time zones relevant to your operations or compare performance across geographic regions.

• VA identity: If running multiple VAs, filter to analyze specific VAs individually or compare performance between VAs.

• Event type: Separate inbound (customer-initiated) vs. outbound (automated system-initiated) VA sessions to understand performance differences.

Custom Dashboard Creation

Flexible reporting: Beyond pre-built dashboards, create custom analytical views using underlying VA event data:

• Build dashboards tracking organization-specific KPIs.

• Combine VA metrics with contact center metrics in unified views.

• Create executive summary dashboards with high-level strategic metrics.

• Design operational dashboards for daily monitoring.

AI Token-Based Pricing for Vonage VA

Managing your Virtual Assistant costs just got simpler. A single AI token SKU now covers all VA conversation types, voice, digital, standard and advanced, so you can deploy confidently across any channel without juggling multiple packages. Usage is tracked monthly, and you can purchase additional tokens in advance to stay ahead of overages.

One single VA SKU (consisting of AI tokens) will allow you to use AI tokens flexibly (mix & match) across any conversation type until the token limit is depleted:

• Standard AI Voice minutes (for telephony channel).

• Advanced AI Voice minutes (for telephony channel).

• Standard AI Digital sessions (for WhatsApp, SMS, Webchat channel).

• Advanced AI Digital sessions (for WhatsApp, SMS, Webchat channel).

Key Capabilities

• Each conversation type (Standard AI voice, Advanced AI voice, Standard AI digital, Advanced AI digital) has a different multiplier for AI tokens i.e differential AI token consumption.

• Once the allocated AI tokens are fully consumed by virtual assistants within a month, then overage charges are automatically applicable for the remainder usage in the month. To prevent overage charges, it is recommended to purchase more AI tokens beforehand.

• This SKU usage is tracked on a monthly basis, and the usage limit is reset at the beginning of each month.

Additional Callouts

• AI tokens do not cover the telecom services usage involved in the virtual assistant. Telecom services usage is covered by different SKUs in VCC (Connected minutes for telephony channel, Bundles for WhatsApp & SMS channels). These SKUs need to be purchased separately, along with AI tokens, in order to run Vonage Virtual Assistant.

Vonage Business Communications

VBC for Microsoft Teams PBX Autosync

Available for: Administrators.

Your Teams admin no longer needs to trigger a manual PBX Sync; VBC now keeps user and DID information up to date automatically, reducing administrative friction.

Key Capabilities

• You can configure the auto sync capability to be on or off in the VBC Admin Portal based on your needs and preferences.

• When enabled, your users with Teams and DID extensions will periodically have the VBC user and DID information pushed into the VBC for Teams Administrator portal when Teams users are mapped to VBC users.

VBC Lite for Teams: Voicemail and Notification Enhancements

Available for: all VBC users.

You can now access and manage your Vonage voicemail directly inside Microsoft Teams, without switching apps; new voicemail notifications in the Teams notification center mean you never miss a message.

Key Capabilities

• New Voicemail tab in Vonage Apps that will allow you to manage VBC voicemail from within the Teams desktop environment.

• New VBC voicemail notifications will be posted to the Microsoft Teams application notification center.

Custom Call Screening Voice Message and Suppression of the Default Message

Give callers a branded welcome instead of a generic system prompt, and let your agents start conversations the moment they answer; two new call-entry customisations give your business full control over the first impression.

• Caller-Side Suppression: The default "Please wait while we locate your party" prompt is suppressed. Callers will instead hear a custom pre-recorded message uploaded via the Admin Portal.

• Agent-Side Suppression: The default "You are being called by" message heard by the organization’s agents is fully suppressed, allowing agents to speak with callers immediately upon accepting the call.

GA Release: Feature flag enabled for specific accounts only.

Expected General Availability: Already deployed but behind a feature flag.

VBC Account admins can now upload a custom pre-recorded message for Call Screening and suppress the default system-generated prompts, giving businesses full control over the call-entry experience for their callers and agents.

Key Capabilities

• Custom caller-side message: Admins can upload a custom .WAV file via the Admin Portal. Callers will hear this message instead of the default VBC system prompt.

• Agent-side prompt suppression: The default "You are being called by" message heard by agents is fully suppressed; agents can begin speaking with the caller as soon as the call is accepted.

• Account-level control: Customization is applied at the account level, ensuring other VBC accounts are not impacted.

• Voicemail unaffected: Existing voicemail routing and behavior remain unchanged.

Bulk SMS (Small Broadcast)

Reach up to 50 customers at once with a single SMS, sent straight from your VBC app; each recipient receives it as a private 1:1 message from your business number, with no group thread created.

Key Capabilities

• Send to up to 50 recipients at once: Compose a single message and deliver it simultaneously to multiple contacts, each receiving it as a private 1:1 SMS.

• Flexible recipient selection: Add recipients from your VBC contact list (including contacts), or enter phone numbers manually. A live recipient counter keeps you on track.

• Choose your outbound number: If your extension has multiple phone numbers, select which number to send from so recipients see the right caller ID.

• Message composer with character guidance: Write messages up to 3,200 characters with a live character counter and clear error messaging when limits are reached.

• Confirmation before sending: A review step shows the full recipient count and message text before you hit send, giving you full control over significant actions.

• Delivery feedback & retry: Receive clear success or failure notifications after sending. In partial failure scenarios, a "Try Again" option allows up to two additional retry attempts per failed recipient.

• Bulk Text Room: Each Bulk SMS send creates a dedicated room in your messaging log, giving you a record of when the message was sent and to whom. Replies from recipients appear in their individual 1:1 conversation threads.

• 10DLC & Toll-Free compliance: Bulk SMS enforces carrier compliance requirements. Users sending from unregistered 10DLC numbers will be blocked with a clear error message. Toll-Free Numbers (TFN) are supported; unverified TFNs may be subject to carrier filtering.

Availability

• Platforms: Desktop (Windows & Mac), Web, Mobile (iOS & Android)

• Geography: North America (NAM) only, available for accounts with SMS capabilities enabled and 10DLC registration completed.

• Release: GA

Large Messaging Archive Automated Handling

Your large message archives now handle themselves. VBC automatically splits exports over 50GB, keeps files available for 7 days, and requires no support ticket or time-pressured download window.

Key Capabilities

• Automatic file splitting: Archives exceeding 50 GB are automatically split into multiple files, each capped at 50 GB, ensuring generation completes successfully every time.

• Extended download window: Download tokens are now valid for 7 days (up from 2 hours), giving you ample time to retrieve their files without time pressure.

• 7-day file retention: Generated archive files remain available in the Admin Portal for 7 days before automated deletion, replacing the previous 24–48 hour window.

• Clear in-portal guidance: The Admin Portal archive interface now displays a notification explaining that large requests will result in multiple downloadable files, so you always know what to expect.

• Fully self-service: No support ticket, API token retrieval, or team coordination required; you can request and download large archives independently at any time.

Availability

• Platforms: VBC Admin Portal.

• Release: GA.

VBC 10DLC - Sole Proprietor Registration

Ensure your business SMS messages reach customers reliably; sole proprietors can now complete 10DLC brand registration directly in the Admin Portal without a Tax ID, protecting their SMS service from carrier blocking.

Key Capabilities

• Dedicated sole proprietor registration flow: A new registration path in the Admin Portal collects sole proprietor-specific details, including owner name, DBA name, address, phone, and email, without requiring a Tax ID.

• SMS identity verification: After submitting brand information, TCR reviews the details and sends a PIN code via SMS to the provided mobile number. You validate the PIN directly in the Admin Portal to confirm your identity.

• PIN resend support: If the PIN is not received, a Resend button is available to trigger a new code. PINs are valid for 24 hours; after expiry, the resend option activates automatically.

• Campaign registration unchanged: The campaign registration process remains the same as for standard business accounts; only the brand registration step is new for sole proprietors.

• Single number for SMS: Once the campaign is approved, sole proprietors select one SMS-enabled number from their account. SMS is disabled on all other numbers to ensure compliance with carrier requirements.

• Clear registration status tracking: Registration status is visible in the Admin Portal at every stage, from submission through validation, pending approval, and rejection (with a Delete option to restart if needed).

Availability

• Geography: United States.

• Release: GA.

WhatsApp Enablement for VBC US & UK Accounts

Available for: VBC Administrators, Agents, and Supervisors | Web, Desktop, Mobile (iOS & Android).

You can now connect with customers on WhatsApp, the channel they already use every day, directly from your VBC workspace. Admins can connect a WhatsApp Business Account (WABA), assign numbers to extensions or groups, manage message templates, and track performance, all without leaving VBC.

Key Capabilities

• Native WhatsApp channel in VBC: Connect a WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) via Meta Cloud API directly from the Admin Portal. Once enabled, WhatsApp appears as a channel in the VBC messaging interface alongside SMS and team messages.

• Advanced extension & group assignment: Map WABA numbers to individual extensions, ring groups, or skill-based queues. Configure routing modes, Direct, Round-robin, Skills-based, or Idle-time, along with schedules, presence, and after-hours auto-reply templates.

• Full messaging experience for agents: Send and receive session and template (HSM) messages with support for rich media (images, documents, audio, video), interactive messages (Quick Replies, Call-to-Action buttons, Lists), read receipts, and typing indicators.

• Template lifecycle management: Create, edit, and submit WhatsApp message templates directly from the Admin Portal, with auto-categorization hints to reduce Meta rejections, locale variants, versioning, and a full template library with usage stats.

• Compliance & opt-in enforcement: Opt-in metadata is stored per contact, and template-only messaging is enforced for conversations outside the 24-hour session window, keeping your account compliant with Meta policies and regional regulations (GDPR, India DPDP).

• Analytics & performance tracking: Monitor channel adoption, conversation volumes by Meta category (Marketing, Authentication, Utility, Service), agent productivity metrics (AHT, FRT), SLA tracking, and per-template performance, with export and dashboard support.

• Role-based access control: Granular roles (Org Admin, Channel Admin, Supervisor, Agent) with audit logs for all admin actions, template changes, and routing updates.

• Mobile-optimised experience: WhatsApp is accessible via a Channel Drawer on mobile, keeping the interface clean while supporting up to 4 pinned channels with badge counts and unified search.

Availability

• Platforms: VBC Admin Portal, Desktop (Windows & Mac), Web, Mobile (iOS & Android).

• Geography: Multi-region, US/Canada, UK/Europe, and Rest of World (region-specific pricing applies).

• Release: GA.

Vonage Contact Center

Vonage Contact Center Administration

Migrate API Destinations into Channels

Available for: VCC Administrators.