Using a voice bot as a treatment?

[rolf_b]

Hello

maybe I am phrasing this wrong, but I am in - for me - uncharted territory here.

My company intends to integrate an external Voicebot platform (Cognigy) into our on-premise installation (which will be dead after 2028, I know). These bots will be SIP integrated into our environment, there is a special Session Border Controller to which I route the call if I need the bot to take over. I use
[tt]TRoute['Phonebot001', '', RouteTypeDefault,''][/tt]
for this. The call goes to the Bot and the Bot talks with me. So far, so good. But maybe not, because the call is transferred via INVITE to the Bot, not via REFER (I don't know how to pass the call via REFER).

The problem is the way back. There are many cases where the bot needs to transfer the call back to Genesys, and in these cases, I need to get data back. We send the call back to a Routing Point, and we intend to use custom SIP Headers to transmit reference information. From Cognigy, the call is transferred back to Genesys via SIP REFER. In the log of our SIP Server, I find this REFER request, and it contains the custom headers. But this REFER Request is not used to create the next call leg. Instead, I find a new INVITE for the target routing point, and in this INVITE, the custom headers are lost. It's a new Call-ID on SIP Level, and from the Genesys perspective, this is a brand new call.

So I assume we are doing it wrong. What I [b]want[/b] to do is using the bot as a kind of voice treatment, but since this is Cognigy, I don't know how to do it correctly. Has anybody hints for me, or pointers to the relevant documentation?

Rolf

[Kubig]

Have you configured SIP header mapping? You can use Transfer-Type option to override the behavior of the transfer and decide whether use INVITE or REFER

[rolf_b]

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I defined SIP Header mapping. And I learned yesterday how to request a REFER instead of a re-INVITE by using Transfer-Type or by using enable-refer on the SBC for Cognigy, but SIP Server refuses to do that. There are still several gotchas that I need to check, probably I'm still doing something wrong here.

My hope is that by REFERing the call to Cognigy, the call can be REFERed back to me and SIP Server doesn't follow this with an INVITE (losing SIP Headers from the REFER on the way).

But all this sounds like a workaround because in principle the bot is some kind of external voice treatment, and so there might me a way to handle it as one.

Rolf