There’s quite a buzz around what we’re doing with WhatsApp and, separately, Conversational AI. We appreciate those of you who are patiently excited – there’s an awful lot of work going on behind the scenes, which takes time. Accordingly, I wanted to give you a little update.
WhatsApp is now deployed on production infrastructure and available in the Simwood API. We’re not able to give you the endpoints yet as we need to go through an approval process with Meta, after which it’ll be available in beta. Your customers will then be able to add the generically named Simwood “app” to their WhatsApp for Business accounts and integrate with your Simwood Carrier Services account. You will need to claim numbers they have added which we’re working on now – it is an alternative to the embedded end-user business enrollment from WhatsApp which we think many of you would prefer to avoid the dev overhead of on your own platforms. When we roll this out to the Simwood Hosted platform it’ll be the fully embedded approach for end-user convenience, but you’ll have the option to avoid it if you want to.
Amongst what is already deployed, is messaging. This was low down our priority list, but is so central to the user-permissioning that it made sense to prioritise it. When users on WhatsApp add a Simwood number, they can place calls as we demoed before, but they can also send messages now. These messages have two potential destinations currently – a webhook to you or a Conversational AI agent. Yes, you can build your own two way messaging with users through the Simwood API and yes, an oft requested feature of agents interacting by text is now also possible. If you want to see either in action, add +44 330 122 3003 to speak to or message “Jay” a minimal agent who has access to only our website.
When it comes to Conversational AI, we mentioned in the last podcast how there were several long-running projects we were kicking off, not necessarily deliverable in a single quarter. One of these was bringing them more fully on-net for control, performance and privacy, not to mention economics at scale. For a variety of reasons, that has taken the lead over more bleeding-edge features. This might look like a pause from the outside but is a massive step forward behind the scenes and will enable us to really accelerate some of the other features you might have been hoping to take precedence, and get to solid commercials you can build your own propositions on.
As a reminder, WhatsApp is “just” another skewer in the Simwood Potato, just like SIP and Teams. The Potato enables any-to-any routing of calls at the carrier level, so the prime use-case we see here is consumers accessing enterprise call-centres securely over WhatsApp, e.g. WhatsApp > Teams or SIP (or both). This isn’t just restricted to on-net Simwood numbers either – you can route numbers from your dino-carrier over our BYoC capability and access all the features as if you’d made better procurement decisions! Furthermore, it isn’t just routing; you can access any network-level service wraps on routed calls e.g. call recording with recordings placed directly in your (or your customer’s) secure storage, and a growing list of AI-based options.
If you have a use case we haven’t mentioned that you want to run by us, please get in touch. One challenge we’re having here is that the Potato is a toolkit for our customers to add value and solve problems with. We’re not building a commoditised inflexible product that can just be stacked high and sold cheap – that’ll probably come from purple radioactive people in a decade or so. That presents a massive opportunity for those who can see the applications and opportunities amongst their base. We will however be enabling direct end-user access to our interpretation of generic solutions through Simwood Hosted in due course e.g. agents are already there.
