Two things we are building right now that we are genuinely excited about, and then a long list of what shipped this past week.
🛠️ Custom tools: real quotes, live on the call
You will soon be able to build custom tools that let your agent price out a caller and put together a quote while they are still on the phone. This handles genuinely complex pricing, not just a flat rate card. Here is a full walkthrough:
📲 Collecting information mid-call, by text or by form
Your agent will also be able to collect information from a caller during the call, either by texting them and reading their reply, or by sending them a form to fill out. The demo below uses an email address because it is easy to follow, but this is not limited to simple fields. Forms are the right tool for anything complicated, anything that is easier to handle visually, and potentially taking payments down the road.
📣 Your agent can now greet callers by name
- This one is live. When we know who is calling, your agent can address them by name during the call. If you noticed your agent suddenly using a caller's name recently, that was this.
- There is one small change landing Monday to make it behave exactly right in every case. Get in touch if you want this turned on for your agent and we will set it up with you.
🧾 Custom fields pulled out of every call
- You can now define your own post-call analysis fields, and the AI will extract them from the conversation and put them cleanly at the top of your notification email.
- If you take shirt orders, define "shirt size" and it is simply there in the email. Whatever matters to your business, define it and stop reading transcripts to find it.
🧠 Agent memory is in prototype
- A working prototype is available now. It needs a few changes to your agent's instructions, mainly to tell the AI that it has memory to draw on.
- Reach out if you would like to help us beta test it.
✨ Chat with AI got a lot better
- We made major improvements to it, and we are moving it to the top of the agent settings page so people who did not know it existed can actually find it. This is where you chat, the same way you would with ChatGPT, to change anything about your agent.
- We know some of you are using ChatGPT or Claude for this instead. Ours is the better tool for the job: it knows how the Zinng system works, which variables are available to you, and everything we have worked out over the past year and a half about prompting agents and handling real calls. A general purpose AI, however capable, knows none of that. When we make changes for you, this is literally what we use.
💬 The chat widget overhaul has started
- We began with architectural changes under the hood, so most of this week's work is not visible yet.
- Two things you can see already: you can upload your logo directly instead of hunting down a URL for it, and there is now a preview of the widget. Plenty more coming here.
⭐ Google Reviews widget
- Multiple widgets on any paid plan, so you can run different ones in different places.
- A new carousel layout. Worth a look if you have not tried it.
- A preview, so you can see your changes as you make them.
- We have been genuinely surprised how many of you are using this. Pulling reviews from Yelp and Facebook is next.
📱 Mobile apps
- Quick messages are now on mobile. The saved shortcut replies you already had on the web inbox shipped to the apps today.
- A status banner now appears in the apps when a provider is having problems, matching what the web app already did. It is rare, but it happened for an hour or two recently, and 99% of the time an outage like that is a provider rather than us. Either way you should be able to see it.
- Sent photos now appear instantly. They were always sending immediately, the app just took its time showing it.
- We darkened the red used to mark a conversation urgent, based on your feedback.
🔧 Also shipped
- Email notification settings are now per user, so your settings are yours and do not affect your teammates. Find them in the inbox under the gear icon.
- Nearby area code suggestions when you pick a number for a new agent. In some US cities it is nearly impossible to find an available number in the area code you want, and that is true across every provider, not just ours.
- Sign in with an emailed code. If you have had trouble signing in, this gets you in without a password. It is an option, not a change to how you log in today.
- Fixed audio not playing back on shared conversations.
As always, keep the feature requests coming. Everything we can build, we will build.