Transition to Twilio Flex

To begin, you will need the following:

• A Twilio Flex instance.
• An AI Assistant in the same Twilio account as the Flex instance.
• A webhook connecting your Assistant with Twilio Conversations (see the guide Use Twilio Conversations as a Channel for the steps).
• A TaskRouter Workspace SID and Workflow SID to hand off the Conversation to the right Workflow.

After you've connected your AI Assistant to Twilio Conversations, your AI Assistant will listen to any message that has only one participant (your customer) in the conversation. To hand off the conversation to a human agent, the AI Assistant has to call a Tool that uses the Flex Interactions API to hand off to a Flex agent.

You can do this either by using a Twilio Function that was already deployed into your Twilio account as part of the Conversations setup above, or by creating your own HTTP endpoint.

Either way, once a second participant joins the conversation, your AI Assistant will automatically stop listening.

If you followed the AI Assistants with Twilio Conversations guide, one of the Twilio Functions that you deployed as part of this was a Flex Handover tool.

To make sure you hand off the conversation to the right Flex agents, configure environment variables for your Twilio Functions that specify the TaskRouter Workspace SID and TaskRouter Workflow SID for the handoff.

In the ai-assistants-samples project that you cloned and deployed, run the following commands:

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twilio serverless:env:set --key=FLEX_WORKFLOW_SID --value=<your-taskrouter-workflow-sid>
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twilio serverless:env:set --key=FLEX_WORKSPACE_SID --value=<your-taskrouter-workspace-sid>

Make sure to replace <your-taskrouter-workflow-sid> and <your-taskrouter-workspace-sid> with the respective values.

To use this webhook as a Tool, you will need your Functions domain from the AI Assistants Samples deployment. If you can't find your Functions domain, head to the Twilio Console and click on Service Details next to your ai-assistants-samples Service. You can find the domain in the Environments section.

Once you have both your Flow SID and your Functions domain, you can go into your AI Assistant in the Twilio Console and create a new Tool with the following configuration:

{}

Alternatively to using Twilio Functions for your Tool, you can host an HTTP endpoint yourself and use the Flex Interactions API to route the conversation to a Flex Agent.

Here is an example of calling the API using the Twilio Python helper library:

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interaction = twilio_client.flex_api.v1.interaction.create(
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            channel={
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                'type': 'chat', # can be chat or SMS 
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                'initiated_by': 'customer',
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                'properties': { 
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                    'media_channel_sid': conversation_sid # Stored in the `X-Session-Id` request header
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                }
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            },
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            routing={
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                'properties': {
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                    'workspace_sid': taskrouter_workspace_sid, # your taskrouter workspace sid
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                    'workflow_sid': taskrouter_workflow_sid, # your taskrouter workflow sid
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                    'attributes': {
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                        'from': 'Customer Name' # the name of the customer (you can use the `X-Identity` header to look up the customer's identity)
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                    }
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                }
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            }
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        )

Now you've configured your AI Assistant to hand off a conversation to a Flex agent if it cannot fulfill a user's request.

• Learn how to add an AI Assistant to your React application
• Learn how to have your AI Assistant transition a conversation to a Studio flow