Cognigy

Our full take

Cognigy is the enterprise end of this directory. It is not a tool you sign up for on a Tuesday and have a phone agent live by Friday. It is a platform that big contact-centre operations buy through a sales process, deploy across voice and chat in over 100 languages, and run for years. The customer list tells you who it is built for: Lufthansa runs more than 16 AI agents on it and fields millions of conversations a year, Toyota built a service agent wired into the car’s onboard electronics, and Bosch, Mercedes-Benz, Bayer and Nestlé are on the books too. Over 1,250 brands in total, per Cognigy’s own homepage.

The first thing you need to know, because it changes the whole picture, is the ownership. In July 2025 NICE (the contact-centre software giant) agreed to buy Cognigy for about USD 955 million, and the deal closed on 8 September 2025. Cognigy.AI continues as a product, now branded “NiCE Cognigy” and folded into NICE’s CXone Mpower contact-centre platform. So you are not buying from an independent German startup any more. You are buying from a large public company, and the commercial motion increasingly runs through NICE’s sales org. For a big buyer that is reassurance. If you were betting on a scrappy independent roadmap, treat the acquisition as a strategic watch-item.

Now the part small teams will not like: there is no public price. Cognigy does not publish a per-minute rate, a per-seat list price, or a pricing page you can self-serve from. Everything is quote-only and sales-led. The billing is not even per minute. It is metered by usage unit: a “billable conversation” (up to 50 user messages in 24 hours for chat, or up to 10 minutes of a call for voice), plus concurrent voice lines on the Voice Gateway, plus knowledge queries on Knowledge AI. Third-party resellers float an entry point around USD 2,500 a month for standalone Cognigy.AI and enterprise deals well into six figures a year, but those are not Cognigy-published numbers and we have not verified them, so we record no per-minute figure rather than guess one. If you want a real number, you have to get a written quote.

On the voice side, Cognigy does not lock you into one set of voices, which is a genuine strength. The Voice Gateway is a routing layer: you bring your own speech-to-text and text-to-speech (that is the part that turns the caller’s words into text and the agent’s text back into speech). It pre-integrates Deepgram, Microsoft, AWS, Google, Nuance, Soniox, Speechmatics and ElevenLabs for the listening side, taps over 1,000 synthetic voices from the likes of ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Microsoft and AWS for the speaking side, and lets you add a custom provider or even a cloned brand voice. You can run the speech containers on-premises if data has to stay in your building. It plugs into your own phone-number supplier over SIP, hands live calls to a human agent (warm transfer), and as of the 2026 releases it supports MCP, the emerging standard for letting an agent call external tools in a controlled way.

Compliance is where Cognigy’s German, enterprise heritage shows. Per its Trust Center it holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 42001 (the AI-management standard), TISAX and BSI C5, and it is GDPR compliant with EU data processing and on-prem and private-cloud deployment for buyers with strict data-residency rules. That is a serious list, and it is exactly what a regulated European enterprise checks for. One gap to flag honestly: we did not find HIPAA on Cognigy’s stated certification list, so we mark HIPAA false here. If you are a US healthcare buyer who needs a signed BAA, do not assume it is covered. Ask sales directly and get it in writing before you build a clinical workflow on it.

So who is this for. If you are a large support or sales operation, you run a multi-language contact centre, you care about data residency and enterprise governance, and you can run a procurement cycle, Cognigy is a credible heavyweight and the customer roster backs that up. The 100+ language support and the bring-your-own-speech flexibility are real advantages over the turnkey crowd. But if you are a founder or a small agency who wants to drag together a phone agent this week, see a price before you commit, and pay by the minute, this is the wrong tool. It is built for buyers with a budget and a timeline measured in quarters, not for shipping fast and cheap.

We have not placed our own test calls to Cognigy yet, so there are no Voxrater latency numbers here, and the scores above are an editorial preview, not a measured result. The facts above (the NICE acquisition, the customers, the 100+ languages, the speech providers and the compliance list) are sourced from Cognigy’s own site and documentation plus press coverage of the acquisition, captured 2026-05-31.

AI-assisted research, editorial judgement and review by Voxrater. Last reviewed 2026-05-31. Voxrater earns affiliate commissions on some vendors; we flag reliability honestly and our verdicts are not for sale. Every factual claim above links to a dated source.