Comparing Amazon Connect and PolyAI? Both are Contact Center & CCaaS, Enterprise and Voice & Phone AI tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
| Attribute | Amazon Connect | PolyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · $0.038/min | Per resolution · Custom (per-minute) |
| Founded | 2017 | 2017 |
| Categories | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI |
| Integrations | Salesforce Zendesk ServiceNow Marketo Amazon Lex AWS Lambda Amazon S3 Amazon Kinesis | Salesforce HubSpot Zendesk Microsoft Dynamics OpenTable Zapier |
Amazon Connect is AWS's cloud contact center, rebranded Amazon Connect Customer in April 2026. It runs voice, chat, email, and SMS from a single agent workspace, with agentic self-service bots, prebuilt AI agents, real-time agent assist, and conversational analytics now bundled into the base channel rates. Everything is pay as you go: no per-seat licenses, no servers to manage, and capacity scales from a handful of agents to tens of thousands without a contract renegotiation.
The product launched in March 2017 as a productized version of the contact center technology Amazon built for its own retail business, with GE Appliances among the first customers, and 2017 is the launch year rather than a company founding. Since then it has become AWS's showcase for enterprise scale: Intuit scales TurboTax support from 6,000 to 11,000 agents in minutes, Capital One runs its direct bank and fraud operations on it, and Priceline leaned on it through pandemic call spikes. In April 2026 AWS acquired conversational AI vendor NLX and reorganized Connect into four solutions, with Connect Customer as the customer service arm; United Airlines used the NLX technology to ship a conversational AI agent in three months instead of twelve.
Pricing is unusually public for this market. Published US rates are $0.038 per voice minute plus telephony charges, $0.010 per chat message, $0.014 per SMS, and $0.080 per email, with the AI capabilities included rather than sold as add-ons. A cheaper non-AI Customer Basic tier exists but AWS does not publish its rates on the main pricing page, and a free tier covers 90 minutes of monthly usage. Real bills hinge on volume, so model your traffic before committing.
Choose Amazon Connect if you have builders on staff, live in the AWS ecosystem, and want usage-based pricing that scales to enormous volume. Skip it if you want a turnkey helpdesk with a fixed per-seat bill, since getting the most from it still means wiring up Lambda, Lex, and your CRM yourself.
Read the full Amazon Connect listing → · See Amazon Connect alternatives →
PolyAI answers the phone. While most of this directory started with chat and added voice later, PolyAI has been voice-first since three Cambridge machine-learning PhDs, Nikola Mrkšić, Pei-Hao Su, and Tsung-Hsien Wen, founded it in London in 2017 out of the university's Machine Intelligence Lab. Its agents are known for sounding genuinely human and for surviving the things that break lesser systems: interruptions, accents, background noise, and callers who change their mind mid-sentence. Restaurants, hotels, banks, and utilities use it to answer every call instantly, day and night, with customers like PG&E, UniCredit, Golden Nugget, and Fogo de Chao on the roster.
The platform matured into what the company calls an agentic dialog platform: Agent Studio for building and managing agents without code, a developer kit for deeper work, and Raven, a proprietary conversation model trained on more than a billion enterprise conversations. Compliance boxes (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI) are ticked, which matters because taking payments and health information over the phone is exactly where voice AI earns its keep.
Investors have noticed the wedge. In December 2025 PolyAI raised an $86 million Series D at a valuation around $750 million, with NVIDIA's venture arm participating, bringing total funding past $200 million. Commercially it bills on usage, priced per minute of conversation, with rates scoped to your call volume rather than published on the site.
Choose PolyAI when the phone is your problem. If most of your support pain is hold music, missed calls, and staffing the night shift, a voice-native specialist will beat a chat-first platform's bolted-on telephony, and PolyAI is one of the most proven voice specialists in the market.
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