AI call center software is three different purchases sold under one name. Contact center platforms such as Genesys Cloud CX, NICE CXone, Talkdesk and Five9 build an AI agent into the system your team already logs into. AI agent vendors such as PolyAI and Retell AI answer calls in front of the platform you run today. Agent assist and analytics vendors such as Verint, Balto and Cresta started out helping the people on the phones, and each of them now sells an AI agent too.
Work out which of the three you are buying before you compare prices, because the vendors charge for the AI in different units: per seat, per minute, per resolved conversation, in tokens or credits, or by quote. The two tables below cover fourteen vendors, with every price and capability taken from the vendor's own pages on October 27, 2026. We make Telvana, which is one of the rows, so it gets a short section of its own further down instead of any argument in the tables.
AI call center software compared: 14 vendors at a glance
Read the last two columns first. They tell you whether a vendor means moving your contact center, and who on your side owns the agent once it is live.
| Vendor | What it is | Its AI agent | How calls reach it | Who builds the agent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Genesys Cloud CX | Contact center platform | Virtual agents | You move onto Genesys, on its voice service or your own carrier | Your team, with no-code design tools |
| NICE CXone | Contact center platform | AI agents for self-service and proactive outreach | You move onto NICE | Your team in its low-code AI Agent Studio, or NICE services and certified partners |
| Talkdesk | Contact center platform | Autopilot | Its platform, or its AI layer in front of another contact center | Your operations staff, with no-code tools |
| Five9 | Contact center platform | AI Agents | You move onto Five9 | Your team, writing goals in natural language, or Five9 professional services |
| Amazon Connect Customer | Contact center platform | Agentic self-service | You move onto Amazon Connect numbers | Your team on a no-code canvas or in code, AWS, or partners |
| Zendesk | Customer service platform with voice | AI agents for voice, on inbound calls | Zendesk's own voice product, which its voice AI agents require | Your team, from procedures written in plain language |
| Dialpad | Contact center platform | Dialpad Resolve | You move onto Dialpad's voice network | Your team, with Dialpad's help |
| Bright Pattern | Contact center platform | AI Virtual Agent | Its cloud, on premises or a private cloud, or your own carrier | Your team, with low-code configuration |
| PolyAI | AI agents | Dialog Agent | In front of your current contact center platform, or over SIP | Your team, your developers, or PolyAI's own engineers |
| Retell AI | AI agents | AI Voice Agents | A SIP trunk from your phone system, or its own numbers | Your team or developers, partners, or Retell's engineers |
| Verint | Assist, analytics and AI agents | Conversational AI Agents | On top of the contact center platform you run | Your operations team, in Agent Factory |
| Balto | Assist and QA, plus an AI agent | Togo | On top of your phone system and contact center platform | Balto's implementation team |
| Cresta | Assist, analytics and AI agents | Cresta AI Agent | On top of your existing contact center | Cresta, your team, or Cresta first and then your team |
| Telvana (ours) | AI agents | Voice, SMS and web chat agents | An option in your phone menu, a forwarding rule or a dedicated number | Our team builds and tests it, and you approve it |
Eight of the fourteen are the platform your agents work in all day, so their AI agent comes with that platform. If you are not replacing yours this year, at most one of those eight rows applies to you: the one you already run. Talkdesk is the exception, since it sells its AI layer separately and says it is compatible with any contact center, on premises, cloud or hybrid.
The build column matters for a different reason. Most vendors hand your team a builder. PolyAI, Retell AI and Cresta will also put their own engineers on the build, and Balto runs the setup itself. Ask each one who changes the agent after launch when a transfer rule turns out to be wrong, and whether that person is on your payroll or theirs.
What each AI call center vendor publishes about price
Prices as published on October 27, 2026. Seat prices are per human agent, so the right-hand column is where the cost of the AI shows up.
| Vendor | Published price | How the AI is charged |
|---|---|---|
| Genesys Cloud CX | $75 to $240 per user a month across four editions, billed annually | AI Experience tokens. Each organization gets some every month, and the top edition adds 30 per named agent. No price per token is published |
| NICE CXone | $110 to $209 per agent a month across four suites. Ultimate Suite is $249 per agent a month plus $0.25 per session | Some AI features are marked as add-ons or consumption based |
| Talkdesk | $85 to $225 per user a month across four editions | Its AI products carry no published price |
| Five9 | No published price | Quoted on seat count, channel mix and AI usage |
| Amazon Connect Customer | $0.038 per voice minute plus telephony, with no seats | Included in the channel price, with no separate AI license fee |
| Zendesk | Support Team $19, Suite Team $55 and Suite Professional $115 per agent a month, billed annually | Per automated resolution: 5 or 10 per agent a month included, then $1.50 committed or $2.00 pay as you go. Voice adds telephony and $0.005 a minute while the AI agent is on the call |
| Dialpad | $89 to $149 per user a month for its contact center plans, billed annually | AI Agent Credits at a custom price. A conversation bills only when the AI looks something up or takes an action |
| Bright Pattern | No published price | An add-on to the package you choose |
| PolyAI | No published price for the agent | Per minute, with maintenance and 24/7 support included |
| Retell AI | $0.07 to $0.31 a minute, pay as you go | The minute rate, which moves with the model, voice and add-ons you choose |
| Verint | No published price | Quoted |
| Balto | No published price | Seats for the platform, and its Togo agent by the minute |
| Cresta | No published price | Quoted |
| Telvana (ours) | From $399 a month, based on call volume, plus a one-time setup fee | One monthly price sized to your volume. No per-minute rate is published |
Six of the fourteen publish no price at all. Of the eight that do, only Amazon Connect, Zendesk and Retell AI publish an AI rate, with a defined unit, that you can multiply by your own volume. With the rest, the AI is bundled into a seat edition, sold in tokens or credits with no published rate, or quoted.
How is AI call center software priced?
AI call center software is priced in five units: seats for your human agents with the AI on top, minutes, resolved or billable conversations, tokens or credits, and a quote. Each unit gets expensive in a different situation, so the lowest headline price depends on how many calls the AI takes, how long they run and how many seats you keep.
| Pricing unit | Who uses it here | What makes it expensive | What to get in writing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seats, with the AI on top | Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Dialpad, Zendesk | The seat bill follows headcount, not calls, and it shrinks only when you remove seats | The price of the AI in its own unit, and what the contract lets you do with seats as the AI takes calls |
| Per minute | Amazon Connect, Retell AI, PolyAI, Balto's Togo | Long calls, and the minutes the AI spends on a call before it transfers | Whether billing stops at a transfer. Retell says its agent fee does |
| Per resolution or billable conversation | Zendesk, Dialpad | Success: the more the AI finishes, the more you pay | The written definition of a resolution, and who decides that one happened |
| Tokens or credits | Genesys, Dialpad | Nothing can be forecast until you know how many a conversation uses | Tokens or credits per conversation on your own call types, and the price of each one |
| Quote | Five9, Bright Pattern, Verint, Cresta | What is included, as much as the price | A quote with the AI, telephony, build and support on separate lines |
On the resolution row, Zendesk's own help center says a language model reads each conversation when it ends to confirm the request was resolved, and groups resolutions into tiers, some of which do not count against your allowance (Zendesk on automated resolution tiers). Read that page before you model the cost, because the tier rules decide your bill.
One month of AI-handled calls on two published rates
Take 10,000 calls a month that an AI agent handles, averaging four minutes each, which is 40,000 minutes. At Amazon Connect Customer's published $0.038 a voice minute, with the AI included, that comes to $1,520, plus US inbound telephony that AWS's own worked example prices at $0.0022 a minute, about $88 more (AWS pricing appendix). At Retell AI's published $0.07 to $0.31 a minute, the same minutes cost $2,800 to $12,400, depending on the model, voice and add-ons you choose, before any concurrency beyond the 20 calls it includes. The volume is made up for the example, so put your own call counts and handle times in its place.
You cannot run this arithmetic for Genesys, Talkdesk or Dialpad from their pages, because none of them publishes the price of the AI in a unit you can multiply. NICE's Ultimate Suite gives a per-session figure, but its pricing page does not say what a session is. That price is the first number to ask any of them for. To turn a per-minute rate into a cost per contact for your own call mix, use the worksheet in how to compare what AI voice agent platforms charge.
Which kind of AI call center software do you need?
It depends on two things: whether you are replacing your contact center platform this year, and whether your problem is how many calls reach your team or how each of those calls goes. Those two answers put you in one of the three groups before any single vendor comes into it.
| Your situation | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your platform contract is ending, or you are leaving an on-premises system | Contact center platforms with AI agents built in | The AI and the platform come in one contract, inside the system your team already uses |
| Your platform stays, and too many calls that follow a written procedure still reach people | A quote for your platform's own AI agent, then one or two AI agent vendors that work in front of it | Your platform's agent is the easiest to switch on. The others compete on price and on who builds it. Ask every one of them about the same call type |
| Calls reach the right people, but handle time, quality or compliance is the problem | Agent assist and analytics | They change how each call goes, not how many reach your team |
| You have engineers who want to build and run the agent | A developer platform priced per minute | You control the whole build, and you own every fix |
| You run calling programs for several clients | Whichever of the above keeps each client's agents, numbers and call records apart | Ask how client separation works before anything else |
The difference between an AI agent, agent assist and analytics, and where each one changes your queue, is laid out in what AI call center agents handle and how to add them. If the open question is whether a call type should go to software or to an outsourcer at all, the outsourcing vs AI agents scorecard scores it, and for outbound campaigns, the predictive dialer comparison works out per campaign which one should run it.
Contact center platforms with AI agents built in
These eight are the system your agents work in: numbers, routing, the agent desktop, recording, reporting and an AI agent on top. Buying one for its AI means moving your center onto it, unless it is the platform you already run, in which case its AI agent is the first quote to get.
Genesys Cloud CX sells four editions from $75 to $240 per user a month on an annual commitment. Virtual agents run on AI Experience tokens in every edition: each organization gets an allotment, the top edition adds 30 tokens per named agent, and Genesys publishes no price per token. Calls run on Genesys Cloud Voice or on your own carrier (Genesys pricing).
NICE CXone suites run from $110 to $209 per agent a month, and the Ultimate Suite is $249 per agent a month plus $0.25 per session. Its AI agents cover self-service and proactive outreach and are built in a low-code AI Agent Studio, with NICE professional services and certified implementation partners also on offer (NICE AI agents for self-service).
Talkdesk editions run from $85 to $225 per user a month, and its AI products are priced separately with no published rate. Its Autopilot virtual agent is a no-code tool, which Talkdesk says is meant to "enable operational staff to train the virtual agent" (Talkdesk Autopilot).
Five9 publishes no price. It says its pricing "scales to your seat count, channel mix, and AI usage" and that a guided demo produces the quote (Five9 platform). Its AI agents are configured by defining goals in natural language rather than building fixed flows, and Five9 sells professional services for the work.
Amazon Connect Customer has no seats and no tokens. You pay $0.038 a voice minute, $0.010 a chat message and $0.014 an SMS message, plus telephony, and AWS says all AI capabilities are included in those channel prices (Amazon Connect Customer pricing). Its AI agents are designed on a no-code canvas or in code, and AWS Professional Services and partners do implementations.
Zendesk's Suite Team is $55 and Suite Professional $115 per agent a month on annual billing. AI agents come with every plan and are billed per automated resolution, with 5 or 10 included per agent a month and then $1.50 committed or $2.00 pay as you go. Voice AI agents need Zendesk's own voice product rather than its partner telephony edition, take inbound calls, and add telephony charges plus $0.005 a minute while connected (Zendesk Talk pricing).
Dialpad's contact center plans run from $89 to $149 per user a month on annual billing. Dialpad Resolve, its AI agent, is sold as a pool of AI Agent Credits at a custom price, and a conversation bills only when the AI retrieves information or takes an action such as scheduling, routing or an order lookup (Dialpad pricing).
Bright Pattern publishes no price. You choose a package and then the add-ons you need, and AI is one of the add-ons (Bright Pattern pricing). It runs as a cloud service, on premises or in a private cloud, with the option to bring your own carrier.
AI agents that work in front of your current platform
These vendors leave your contact center platform where it is. Calls reach their agent by a transfer, a forwarding rule or a SIP connection from the platform you already run, and the agent sends back what it cannot finish. Compare them on the price unit and on who builds and maintains the agent.
PolyAI says its agent "runs on top of the CCaaS platform you already have" and names Five9, NICE CXone, Twilio Flex, Amazon Connect, Genesys, Dialpad, Talkdesk and custom SIP (PolyAI on call center voice AI). The agent is priced per minute with maintenance and support included, but the rate is quoted rather than published (PolyAI pricing). Your developers can build on it, or PolyAI can assign its own forward deployed engineers and dialogue designers.
Retell AI is self-serve, at $0.07 to $0.31 a minute with $10 in free credits, and 20 concurrent calls included before $8 a month for each one beyond that (Retell AI pricing). It connects to phone systems over a SIP trunk, with written setups for routing calls from Five9 and Talkdesk to its agents. You can build it yourself, through a certified partner, or with Retell's own deployment engineers.
Agent assist and analytics vendors that now sell AI agents
Verint, Balto and Cresta began with tools for the people on the phones: live guidance during the call, automatic notes and summaries, and quality scoring on every conversation. Each now sells an AI agent as well. All three run on top of the platform you have, and none of them publishes a price.
Verint's AI agents, for self-service and for agent assist, are built and maintained in Agent Factory, which Verint describes as "built for your operations team". It also says its platform "integrates with any CCaaS, CRM, or AI model" (Verint AI agents).
Balto sells one plan, Balto Plus, priced per seat, while its AI agent, Togo, is priced by the minute instead (Balto pricing). It has prebuilt integrations with more than 60 phone and contact center providers, and its implementation team handles the technical integration.
Cresta offers three ways to deploy its AI agent: Cresta runs the deployment, Cresta builds the first agent and then coaches your team to own it, or your team does all of it with Cresta's tools (Cresta implementation options). It also sells live agent assist and conversation analytics across human and AI agents.
Where our agents fit in this list
Telvana belongs in the AI agent group above. Pricing starts at $399 a month based on call volume, plus a one-time setup fee, and we publish no per-minute rate. Our team builds and tests the agent from your scripts, policies and transfer rules, and nothing takes a live call until you approve it.
It answers calls in English and Spanish, places outbound calls from a contact list or from your own systems, answers website chat, and runs an SMS agent and SMS campaigns as an add-on at $20 a month per workspace. Calls transfer to the number you choose under rules you set, every call is recorded, transcribed, summarized and tagged by outcome, and each team or client program can have its own workspace. Two limits to weigh: transfers are cold, so the person who picks up is not handed a summary, and we hold none of the security certifications some contracts require.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best AI call center software?
There is no single best one, because the fourteen vendors here sell three different things. If you are replacing your contact center platform, compare the platforms with AI agents built in. If your platform stays, get its own AI agent quoted alongside one or two AI agent vendors that work in front of it, all on the same call type.
How much does AI call center software cost?
Published prices on October 27, 2026 run from $19 to $249 per user or agent a month for the vendors that charge seats, with the AI often extra, to $0.038 a voice minute with the AI included on Amazon Connect and $0.07 to $0.31 a minute on Retell AI. Six of the fourteen vendors publish no price at all.
Is there cheap AI call center software for a small team?
The vendors without seat fees cost the least at low volume. Amazon Connect charges per interaction with no minimums or long-term contracts, and Retell AI is pay as you go with $10 in free credits. Talkdesk also lists an option for businesses under 50 employees with 25 licenses, $100 in free credit and no contract.
Do I have to replace my contact center platform to use AI agents?
No. AI agent vendors such as PolyAI and Retell AI take calls by transfer, forwarding or SIP from the platform you already run, and Verint, Balto and Cresta run on top of it. The contact center platforms in this list sell AI agents that run on their own platform.
What is the difference between agent assist and an AI agent?
Agent assist helps a person during the call with suggested answers, notes and summaries, so every call still reaches someone on your team. An AI agent answers or places the call itself, finishes what it can and transfers the rest. Only the AI agent changes how many calls reach your team.
Which AI call center vendors publish their prices?
Eight of the fourteen publish a price: Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Zendesk, Dialpad, Retell AI and ours. Of those, only Amazon Connect, Zendesk and Retell AI publish what the AI itself costs per unit, so they are the only three you can price against your own volume without a quote.
Hear an agent take one of your calls
Book a demo and bring your top call types. We'll show you which ones an agent can take, let you hear it handle one, and quote the monthly price and setup fee against your volume. More on choosing a vendor sits under choosing a platform.