Operator is a platform for building conversational AI agents
Operator is an infrastructure platform that provides the core building blocks for scalable, production-ready AI agents.We provide the infrastructure and tools needed to build, deploy, and manage production-grade conversational AI agents. You focus on your agent’s business logic—we handle the connective tissue that lets agents access external systems, talk to users, and operate in real time.
A conversational agent is a language model with instructions and tools, wrapped in infrastructure purpose-built for real-time and asynchronous conversations with users. Each conversation runs in its own dedicated process, maintaining state across the full interaction—whether it’s a one-hour phone call or a multi-day async email thread.Conversational agents maintain memory across conversations—from simple summaries of recent interactions to full searchable conversation history. This enables use cases like customer service agents that remember previous issues or appointment scheduling that builds on past preferences.Learn more about agent fundamentals
Operator supports multiple prompting strategies that scale with complexity:
Fixed prompts: Static instructions for simple, single-goal conversations—like confirmations or data collection—with support for dynamic templating based on context or state.
Intent-routing prompts: Structured prompts for multi-path scenarios where the agent dynamically selects from many possible workflows, such as customer support triage.
Workflow prompts: Strict, state-driven flows designed for interactions that require a specific sequence of actions.
For intent-routing and workflow scenarios, we handle dynamic context management under the hood—keeping the active context small and focused to improve instruction-following and reduce latency.
Tools extend your agent’s capabilities beyond simple conversations, enabling actions like scheduling appointments, looking up customer information, or escalating to human agents.In a conversation, imagine the first party is you, the builder of the agent, conversing with the second party, the conversational agent itself. A third party is an external system controlled neither by you nor the conversational agent.
First-party custom API integrations: Bring your own APIs or MCP servers to connect to your internal databases, services, and business systems with full authentication and state management support.
Second-party platform tools: Built-in conversation capabilities like call transfers, DTMF tone handling, sending SMS during calls, and voicemail detection.
Third-party integrations: One-click connections to common business tools including Google Calendar, Salesforce, Zendesk, Notion, and other CRM systems.
For simple use cases, platform tools and pre-built integrations are typically sufficient. Complex business scenarios, however, will require custom API integrations to access internal customer data, case management systems, or specialized business logic.
We use the program-once-use-everywhere approach, so the same agent runs across multiple communication channels without modification:
Phone: Phone calls with optimized latency and interruption handling
WebRTC: In-app or browser-based voice calls
Realtime chat: Websocket-based real-time chat
Async chat: HTTP-based async chat
SMS (coming soon): Async text-based conversations
Email (coming soon): Async email threads
Channel-specific capabilities (like sending links via SMS during a phone call) are available through platform tools when relevant. We also support custom channels, so you can build your own.
Operator includes built-in systems for measuring and improving agent performance:
Simulated conversations: Use LLM-driven scenario testing to validate agent behavior across a range of conversation patterns, before deploying to real users.
Automated evaluations: LLM-based judges review transcripts and conversation traces against configurable criteria to score quality, accuracy, and coverage.
Conversation analytics: Surface trends, outliers, and failure patterns across conversations to guide prompt iteration and agent improvement.
Our platform is built for iterative development—start simple and add complexity as you better understand your use case:
Begin with basic prompting for straightforward conversations
Add integrations when you need external data and actions
Implement evaluation to measure and improve performance
Scale with advanced features like intent-routing and custom APIs
Most teams can deploy a functional agent in hours, then iterate based on real conversation data and feedback.Jump into the quickstart guide to build your first agent, or explore the API reference for programmatic integration.