13 of the best conversational intelligence software

Running a business without the right information is like driving without Google Maps—you might know the route, but when a road closes, you’re left scrambling to get to the destination. In the same way, Google Maps notifies you of road closures and faster routes, conversational intelligence software helps you prepare for the twists and turns of the ever-evolving CX landscape. It allows you to change course before it's too late.

From detecting recurring issues to evaluating agent performance, conversational intelligence offers real-time insights and clear data on how to improve the customer experience. Find out everything these tools have to offer teams managing customer interactions, so you can find the right solution for your business.

More in this guide:

• What is conversational intelligence software?
• The 13 best conversational AI tools
• Features of conversation intelligence software
• Benefits of conversational AI tools
• How to choose the right conversational intelligence software
• Frequently asked questions
• Use conversational intelligence software to make better decisions

Conversational intelligence software refers to technology that enables the analysis, understanding, and optimization of conversations between a business and its customers. This software leverages artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) to analyze interactions and customer data in real-time or retrospectively, providing insights and actionable recommendations to improve efficiency and quality.

Learn the capabilities and price points of using these conversational AI platforms.

1. Zendesk

Best for AI-powered CX

Zendesk, the leader in AI-powered customer service software, provides a scalable, user-friendly conversational intelligence solution. This powerful tool enables businesses to leverage intelligent insights from day one, enhancing the speed and quality of customer interactions without the need for technical expertise.

Zendesk AI is purpose-built for CX, pre-trained on over 18 billion real customer service interactions. It gives admins full visibility into optimizing service operations, offering AI-driven recommendations on which conversations to automate next with AI-powered digital autonomous agents and pre-canned responses, boosting overall efficiency.

Zendesk quality assurance tools take performance even further and evaluate 100 percent of customer interactions—across agents, AI bots, and channels—highlighting exceptional performance and areas for improvement. Admins and managers can leverage these insights to provide targeted feedback, enhancing agent training and skill development. Additionally, the churn risk flagging feature monitors customer sentiment in real time, allowing proactive measures to prevent customer attrition.

Zendesk also equips agents with conversational intelligence, empowering them to deliver personalized, efficient service. Our AI copilot delivers real-time guidance, offering tailored responses based on the nuances of each conversation while following admin-defined processes to guide agents step by step through tasks. Generative AI tools provide additional conversational intelligence, giving agents insights into customer needs and emotions, summarizing conversations, crafting comprehensive replies, and adjusting tone as needed.

Our conversational intelligence tools for call center teams automatically generate call transcripts and summaries, offering a detailed record of every customer interaction. These insights help agents wrap up calls faster and let managers offer focused coaching.

Pricing: Plans start at $55 per agent/month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.

Explore more Zendesk pricing plans.

2. Fathom

Best for video meetings

Fathom is a conversational intelligence software for video meetings. It can capture and analyze customer conversations to provide insights into service quality, sales performance, and overall customer satisfaction. Its real-time transcription capability converts spoken dialogue into text. Additionally, the sentiment analysis tools evaluate the emotional tone of interactions, providing insights into customer satisfaction and agent performance.

Team features include shared folders, comments and mentions, and clip sharing. Furthermore, Fathom has real-time insights that provide immediate feedback and guidance during live interactions, allowing agents to adapt their responses on the fly.

Pricing: Plans start at $15 per user/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.

3. Gong

Best for sales pipeline management

Gong is a revenue intelligence software that uses conversational intelligence capabilities to capture and analyze sales interactions across various channels. The platform uses these findings to provide insights that help sales teams understand customer behavior. The transcription capability allows sales teams to review interactions in detail to identify critical moments and track discussion points.

The platform continuously analyzes sales conversations to identify patterns and trends, offering insights into what strategies already work and where businesses can improve. AI-driven recommendations help sales representatives change their pitches to appeal to the nuances of each customer. Moreover, Gong deal intelligence features provide a view of the sales pipeline, highlighting potential risks and opportunities.

Pricing: Contact Gong

4. Jiminny

Best for sales performance management

Jiminny conversation intelligence software is designed for sales, customer service, marketing, and product development teams. Jiminny can automatically log call details, transcriptions, and key insights into a business’s CRM system, making all relevant information accessible and up to date. By updating records of all interactions, Jiminny helps teams track deal progress and maintain complete customer profiles.

Another notable feature of Jiminny is "Ask Jiminny," an AI-powered tool that provides real-time assistance during conversations. By analyzing live interactions, Ask Jiminny can suggest responses, provide context-specific information, and highlight points for the representative to address. Additionally, the Jiminny call scoring system evaluates conversations based on pre-defined criteria, providing a structured performance assessment. Call scoring helps identify strengths and areas for improvement, enabling targeted coaching and training efforts.

Pricing: Contact Jiminny for pricing. A 14-day free trial is available.

5. Chorus by ZoomInfo

Best for go-to-market teams

Chorus by ZoomInfo is a conversation intelligence software designed to assist sales and customer service teams. By recording customer interactions, Chorus provides insights that help teams understand customer needs. Its deal intelligence functionality helps sales teams monitor and manage their deals. Deal intelligence provides a view of the sales pipeline, highlighting key activities, potential risks, and opportunities for engagement.

Contextual trackers automatically identify and highlight important themes and topics discussed during interactions so that teams can pinpoint critical information and trends. Smart Playlists allow users to create custom lists of calls based on specific criteria, such as deal stage, sentiment, or key topics. This feature facilitates targeted review and analysis, enabling teams to find the most relevant conversations.

Pricing: Contact ZoomInfo. A free trial is available.

6. Salesloft

Best for mobile app

Salesloft is a revenue management platform that offers conversational AI tools alongside sales pipeline and forecasting software. This includes AI-powered call summaries and action items, which automatically transcribe calls, summarize key points, and generate personalized action items for follow-up. AI can identify when a competitor’s name is mentioned during a conversation and flag when it occurred.

The Salesloft mobile app allows sales reps to access their conversational intelligence data from anywhere. With the mobile app, reps can review call summaries, schedule follow-up tasks, and stay updated on their pipeline. Salesloft also offers workflow automation capabilities, like creating follow-up tasks based on specific conversation topics, triggering email campaigns, or updating CRM records automatically.

Pricing: Contact Salesloft for pricing.

7. Avoma

Best for free use

Avoma is a conversational AI platform that includes a meeting assistant, collaboration tools, and intelligence analytics. One of its key features is interaction analytics, which tracks metrics such as filler words, monologue lengths, and talk-to-listen ratios. The keyword tracker allows you to monitor specific keywords or phrases used during conversations, like competitor names.

The software also offers an activity dashboard, providing a view of team performance, deal progress, and key metrics. This helps managers track conversations in real time, including time spent talking and hours per user. Avoma also allows users to listen to recordings and comment on meetings without a license.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $19 per user/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.

8. ExecVision

Best for Chrome browser users

ExecVision is a conversational intelligence platform that offers sales, marketing, and QA tools. It works with both audio and video calls, so businesses can get insights into nonverbal cues and body language. The ExecVision Chrome Extension allows businesses to record all conversations taking place in the browser. Its AI-powered call summaries and action items automatically transcribe calls, summarize key points, and generate personalized action items for follow-up.

Its call scoring system lets businesses evaluate conversations against pre-defined metrics to assess agent performance, highlighting strengths and areas needing improvement. Managers can use this data to offer targeted coaching and feedback. Users can also organize conversations in libraries for future training and reference.

Pricing: Contact ExecVision for pricing.

9. CallMiner

Best for contact center operations

CallMiner provides conversation intelligence software that analyzes customer interactions across multiple channels, including voice, chat, email, and social media. It is used in contact centers and customer service operations to provide insights into customer behavior, agent performance, and overall communication effectiveness. Its deep conversation analytics use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze the spoken words, context, sentiment, and emotion behind those words in real time.

The platform lets businesses monitor and enforce regulatory compliance in the finance, healthcare, and telecommunications industries. CallMiner automatically flags interactions that may not meet compliance standards. Additionally, the platform offers quality assurance tools that allow for the automated scoring of calls and interactions.

Pricing: Contact CallMiner for pricing. A 30-day free trial is available.

10. Fireflies.ai

Best for meeting notetaking

Fireflies.ai integrates with conferencing tools and communication platforms to record, transcribe, and analyze meetings in real time so teams can avoid manual notetaking. It integrates with messaging and video platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Slack. Depending on the plan, users can automatically join meetings based on calendar invites and capture audio and video.

Additionally, Fireflies.ai offers features like collaboration tools and AI-powered insights. Team members can leave comments, assign tasks, and create action items directly from the meeting transcripts. The AI-driven insights also let users identify trends, important topics, and areas for improvement in their conversations.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $10 per seat/month, billed annually. A free plan is available.

Recommended reading: Learn how Fireflies.ai integrates with Zendesk.

11. Clari

Best for revenue strategizing

Clari is an AI-powered revenue operations platform that lets businesses manage their sales lifecycles. Using its Copilot tool, businesses can access conversational AI tools. Copilot can generate personalized summaries and action items from sales calls, including highlighting key topics, identifying potential risks or opportunities, and suggesting next steps for follow-up.

Clari Copilot can integrate with CRM platforms to let sales teams sync data, track deal progress, and access relevant information from a single platform. Additionally, Clari Copilot provides real-time coaching and can automatically score conversations based on criteria like talk ratio, sentiment, and key topics.

Pricing: Plans start at $1,080 per rep/year. A free trial is available.

12. Observe.AI

Best for contact center sales teams

Observe.AI is a conversation intelligence platform for contact center operations and sales teams. It records and transcribes interactions from voice and text channels, allowing organizations to understand customer sentiments and identify key trends. The platform can analyze conversations as they happen, offering agents guidance on handling customer queries and ensuring compliance.

Additionally, Observe.AI’s quality assurance tools can automate agent performance evaluation, replacing manual call review processes with AI-driven scoring and analysis. The platform assesses conversations based on pre-defined criteria, such as compliance, empathy, and resolution rates, enabling managers to efficiently identify areas where agents excel or require improvement.

Pricing: Contact Observe.AI for pricing.

13. Revenue.io

Best for sales engagement

Revenue.io is a sales and revenue platform. The software can provide real-time data, call analytics, and automation tools. Its conversation guidance uses AI to deliver insights and suggestions during live sales calls. The call coaching and performance analytics provide managers with insights into sales activities and team performance.

Additionally, Revenue.io integrates with CRM platforms, automatically logging calls, emails, and other customer interactions to maintain records. Revenue.io leverages generative AI to automate the creation of follow-up emails after calls. The software analyzes call content and automatically generates emails summarizing key points, next steps, and action items.

Pricing: Contact Revenue.io for pricing. A free trial is available.

Look for the following features to get the most out of your conversation intelligence tools:

• Agent enhancement tools: AI-powered tools improve agent productivity by guiding them through conversations. For instance, AI can instantly suggest appropriate responses to customer requests and recommend the next steps. Additionally, AI tools can expand agent replies and adjust the tone to fit the situation better.
• Call transcription: AI converts spoken dialogue into text automatically, enabling detailed analysis and insight extraction. Transcriptions provide a searchable and readable format of conversations, allowing you to review interactions, identify key themes, monitor compliance, and assess sentiment more efficiently.
• AI-powered call summaries: Voice AI tools can generate concise and informative summaries that capture the essence and identify the important takeaways from the call.
• Sentiment analysis: By analyzing the sentiment behind words and phrases, companies can gauge customer satisfaction, detect frustration or enthusiasm, and tailor responses accordingly. This insight enables proactive management of customer relationships, allowing agents to address negative sentiments promptly and reinforce positive experiences.
• QA tools: Automatically scoring conversations based on pre-defined criteria allows teams to identify strengths and areas for improvement without having anything fall through the cracks. Managers can use these takeaways to deliver targeted feedback and training, helping agents refine their skills and continuously improve. This structured approach to quality assurance enhances your team's overall service consistency and quality.
• Real-time insights: By providing instant analysis of conversations, sentiment, and key metrics, businesses can quickly address issues and optimize the customer experience as it unfolds. Real-time insights also support dynamic adjustments to strategies and tactics, ensuring interactions are as effective and relevant as possible.

With AI-powered conversation intelligence tools, businesses can unlock the following benefits.

Empowers teams to make data-driven decisions

By relying on factual information from analytics software, businesses can make more informed choices, reduce risks, and improve outcomes. Data-driven decisions help organizations identify trends, uncover opportunities, and optimize their entire CX. Additionally, customer service agents can use real-time insights to resolve customer issues effectively.

Improves service quality

Conversational intelligence software enhances service quality by providing valuable insights into customer interactions. AI can automatically review conversations to identify customer pain points, sentiment, churn risk, and where agents may be missing the mark. This data enables companies to tailor their service offerings, train agents more effectively, and address customer concerns promptly.

Enhances operational efficiency

Using conversational intelligence software significantly enhances operational efficiency by automating processes. For example, instead of relying on manual note-taking during customer phone conversations, voice AI tools can transcribe conversations in real time, ensuring accurate and comprehensive records that are easily searchable and accessible.

AI-powered QA tools can then evaluate these interactions based on compliance, sentiment, customer satisfaction, and more, enabling faster and more consistent performance assessments. This reduces the time spent on manual reviews and administrative tasks, allowing teams to focus on more value-driven activities.

Optimizes agent coaching and training

Since the software analyzes conversations automatically, businesses can monitor key performance indicators like response times, tone, and compliance. This allows managers to identify areas where agents excel or need improvement, offering targeted coaching and training to enhance service skills.

Ensure you get the most out of your software by carrying out the following evaluation before making a decision:

• Verify that it captures all of your communication channels: To gain a comprehensive understanding of customer interactions, it's essential that the software captures data from all relevant channels, including voice, emails, chats, and social media. This ensures a complete view of customer sentiment and behavior.
• Determine if it integrates with your other software: Seamless integration with existing systems like CRM, call center software, and marketing automation tools is vital to avoid data silos and streamline workflows. This provides you with greater insights to personalize conversations.
• Assess how easy it is to use: A user-friendly interface and intuitive navigation are crucial for reducing training time, long-term adoption, and effective use. Complex software can impact productivity and slow adoption.
• Ensure it’s scalable: As your business grows, the software should be able to handle increasing conversation volumes and data loads without compromising performance. A scalable solution ensures that it can adapt to your future needs and avoid the need for endless add-ons or replacement tools later on.

You can get conversational AI tools that check all of these boxes and more by purchasing complete CX software for a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than buying each tool individually.