SignalWire

Why do contact centers need a control plane instead of a CPaaS?

Traditional CPaaS platforms treat contact center interactions as transactions: fire a webhook, receive an event, manage state yourself. This breaks when AI is involved: agents need context from earlier in the call, need to issue commands during reasoning, and need to coordinate handoffs without losing the thread. A control plane keeps all of this inside the platform. Your systems observe and instruct it rather than being responsible for reconstructing it.

How do AI agents work in a SignalWire contact center?

SignalWire's AI kernel runs inside the control plane, not as an external service. When a call arrives, the AI handles it under the constraints defined by SignalWire Markup Language (SWML): which tools it can invoke, what data it can see, when to escalate. If the AI needs to fetch customer data or trigger a workflow, it calls a SWAIG function. Your backend processes it and returns what happens next. The platform coordinates the millisecond-level media operations. You write the business logic.

How does SignalWire handle context when a call transfers from an AI agent to a human?

Because call state lives in SignalWire's control plane rather than in the AI agent or your application, context is preserved automatically across transfers. When a caller moves from an AI agent to a human agent, the full interaction history, collected data, and routing context travel with the call. Not because your code passed it along, but because the call never left the platform.

What protocols does SignalWire support for contact center infrastructure?

SignalWire's control plane is protocol-agnostic. PSTN phone calls, SIP trunks, WebRTC browser clients, and messaging channels all route to the same resources and are governed by the same logic. This means a single AI agent can handle calls from phone numbers, web browsers, and messaging apps without separate code paths, and transfers between protocols preserve context because the call never leaves the control plane.

Can I integrate SignalWire with Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zendesk?

Yes. SignalWire connects to CRMs and business systems via SWAIG functions. When an AI agent or call flow needs customer data, it invokes a function that calls your CRM and returns the result. This keeps business system integration clean: your CRM is a data source the control plane queries, not a system that drives call logic. Any system with an API can be integrated this way.