Balto is a contact center AI platform built around live guidance. Agent Assist shows agents answers, prompts and a checklist while the call is live; QA/QM, Insights, Coaching and Notes run on the same platform, and Togo, its voice agent, handles routine calls on its own. Balto is not a phone system: it connects to the contact center, softphone or dialer you already run. Its competitors split two ways. Another AI layer on the phone system you keep: Ender Turing, Cresta, Observe.AI, Level AI, CallMiner, or Verint with Calabrio. Or the AI built into a contact center suite: NICE CXone, Genesys Cloud CX or Talkdesk.
Choose Ender Turing when you want AI for every customer conversation on the phone system you already run: every call, chat and email analyzed and scored on your own scorecard in seconds, in any language, with its accuracy against your reviewers shown for every point, from your first calls. Stay with Balto when live guidance on every call is the main job and you want it with QA, coaching, call notes and a voice agent from one vendor.
The short answer
- Keep your phone system and put AI on every customer conversation: Ender Turing. AutoQA scores 100% of conversations on your own scorecard, typically in 95%+ agreement with your own reviewers, with the accuracy shown for every point and improved from their reviews. It works in any language your customers speak and connects to Genesys Cloud, Five9, NICE CXone, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, RingCentral, Dialpad and Aircall.
- Live guidance for large enterprise care and sales teams: Cresta.
- AI agents, live assist and QA from one enterprise platform: Observe.AI or Level AI.
- Speech analytics at large scale: CallMiner. Quality and workforce management from one enterprise vendor: Verint, which includes Calabrio.
- AI inside your contact center suite: NICE CXone, Genesys Cloud CX or Talkdesk.
Balto alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Kind | Starting price | Connects to | Automated QA | Live agent assist |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Balto | Agent assist, QA, insights and a voice agent | Per seat, one plan (Balto Plus); Togo by the minute | 60+ integrations, including Five9, Genesys Cloud, NICE CXone, Amazon Connect, Talkdesk and RingCentral | Every interaction, with a scorecard per channel | Yes, its core product |
| Ender Turing | AI for every customer conversation, on your phone system | Free plan; $39 per agent a month | Genesys app, Five9 connector, browser extension for NICE CXone, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, RingCentral, Dialpad, Aircall and more | 100% of conversations, accuracy shown per point | Ender Assist, early access, $0.49 per assisted call |
| Cresta | Enterprise AI platform: AI agents, live assist, workflow automation and QA | Quote; live assist on voice $150,000 a year for up to 100,000 calls | Five9, Genesys, NICE, Amazon Connect, Avaya, Cisco, Twilio, LivePerson | Every interaction, on custom rubrics | Yes (Agentic Assist) |
| Observe.AI | AI agents and CX platform | Quote, by deployment scope | Five9, Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Twilio, Avaya and more | 100% of interactions | Yes (AI Agents for Frontline Teams) |
| Level AI | CX platform: AI agents, QA and assist | Quote: per-agent, platform and usage components | Five9, Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Twilio, Dialpad, RingCentral | QA-GPT on 100% of calls, chats, emails and bot conversations | Yes (Agent Assist) |
| CallMiner | Conversation intelligence and automation | Quote, by users or interaction volume | NICE CXone, Five9, Genesys, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Twilio, RingCentral and more | Fully automated quality forms; 100% of interactions analyzed | Yes (RealTime) |
| Verint, with Calabrio | CX automation and workforce engagement | Quote | Works on top of your existing contact center | 100% of human and automated interactions | Yes (AI Agent Assist) |
| NICE CXone | Contact center suite | $110 per agent a month; Quality Management from $135 | It is the contact center | Auto Score, 100% evaluation coverage | Copilot for Agents, in the Ultimate Suite ($249) |
| Genesys Cloud CX | Contact center suite | $75 per user a month, billed annually; quality assurance from $115 | It is the contact center | Virtual Supervisor AI scoring, paid in tokens | Agent Copilot, included in CX 4 ($240) |
| Talkdesk | Contact center suite | $85 per user a month; quality management in every plan | It is the contact center | AI scoring with QM Assist, an add-on | Copilot, an AI add-on |
Sources, checked October 29, 2026: each vendor's own site (Balto, Ender Turing, Cresta, Cresta on AWS Marketplace, Observe.AI, Level AI, CallMiner, Verint, NICE, Genesys, Talkdesk); the integration lists of Cresta and Observe.AI and the AI-scoring terms of Genesys and Talkdesk, October 22–26. Prices change; check the vendor's page before you buy.
What Balto includes
Balto calls itself an AI workforce for the contact center: agent assist, QA automation, insights and voice agents in one platform. From its own pages, checked October 29, 2026:
- Agent Assist. Answers pulled from your knowledge base, guidance and objection handling while the conversation is live, with a checklist that tracks required steps and disclosures as the call moves (Balto; AI info).
- QA/QM. Scores every call against your scorecard within seconds of hangup. It drafts the scorecard from your playbook, policies or QA form, and drafts changes for you to approve when your calls change; supervisors can override a score, and disputes and overturns are tracked (Balto QA). Voice, email, chat and SMS each carry their own scorecard (Balto omnichannel).
- Insights, coaching and notes. BaltoGPT answers questions across 100% of your conversations, coaching sessions are prepared from each agent's own calls, and call summaries sync to your CRM (AI info; Balto notetaker).
- Togo, its voice agent, handles high-volume calls such as scheduling, order status and account verification, and is priced by the minute (Balto).
- How it runs. Balto has more than 60 prebuilt integrations, among them contact centers, softphones, dialers and CRMs, and a new integration goes live in about 60 days (Balto integrations). Agents take calls on a softphone, on a Windows or Mac computer with a headset; Chromebooks are not supported (system requirements). Most customers are live within 30 days, and real-time guidance in Spanish arrived in 2022 (Balto; AI info).
- Security. SOC 2 Type II certified, HIPAA compliant and PCI DSS certified (Balto).
- Pricing. One plan, Balto Plus, with the full platform. It is priced per seat, and every user counts: frontline agents, managers and executives. There is no price list; what you pay depends on your team size and how you work (Balto pricing).
Teams compare Balto with AI layers that analyze and score every conversation on the phone system they run, and with the agent assist inside contact center suites.
Another AI layer on your phone system
These work on top of the phone system or contact center you run. It keeps routing and recording calls; the layer listens to them, scores them and reports on them.
Ender Turing
Ender Turing is AI for every customer conversation. It listens to every call, chat and email and scores each one on your own scorecard, so reviewers spend their time on the conversations that need a person: critical calls, disputes, calibration and coaching. AutoQA scores 100% of conversations, typically in 95%+ agreement with your own reviewers. The accuracy is shown for every scorecard point, and the accuracy-improvement workflow rewrites point definitions from their reviews (how accuracy is measured).
Across 50+ contact-center deployments, the averages are 100% of calls automatically scored versus a 3–5% manual baseline, +19% customer satisfaction, −15% average handle time, and 68 QA hours saved per specialist per month (case studies). Ender Turing is rated 4.8 out of 5 on G2.
What the AI does on every conversation:
- Analyzes every call, chat and email in seconds, in any language your customers speak, with speech recognition built in-house by its R&D team (speech analytics software).
- Checks the required lines, such as disclosures, consent and identification, with a script-adherence score on every call (compliance rules).
- Answers questions about your conversations in plain language (Chat with EnderGPT).
- Coaches each agent with a weekly EnderGPT coaching note written from that agent's own conversations (agent management).
How it connects to your phone system: the Genesys app signs in with your own Genesys OAuth client and ingests the divisions and queues you choose; the Five9 connector exports recordings and metadata over SFTP; the browser extension records calls in stereo in the browser workspaces of NICE CXone, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Webex Contact Center, RingCentral, 8x8, Dialpad and Aircall, with nothing installed inside them; and recordings from any other system arrive through the API, SFTP or upload (integrations).
Scoring starts from the first calls: managed scorecards and the templates for your case are installed on sign-up, and Business and Enterprise add dedicated implementation engineers for connectors, your own scorecards and the rollout. On the Team and Business plans, AutoQA scores every conversation at any volume within the seat price, with no per-evaluation charge. Support and customer success come directly from Ender Turing's own team and are included in the subscription.
Live guidance during the call comes from Ender Assist, a separate product in early access at $0.49 per assisted call. A Chrome extension shows recommendations in a side panel while the call runs in the agent's browser-based telephony page; flows, prompts and the details to capture are set in a management web app, and flows can be generated from your script document (agent assist). It runs in production at a clinic network with 150 procedures, where it shows the agent the preparation rules of the procedure the patient is booking, and at an outbound team booking meetings for IT companies, where it shows the answers from a playbook of 20 objections.
Ender Turing is SOC 2 Type II audited; the latest report is available under NDA. It is HIPAA compliant, with a Business Associate Agreement signed on the Enterprise plan, and on Enterprise it runs in your private cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) or fully on-premise (data security). The free plan covers up to 5 agents with no expiry, and Team is $39 per agent a month (pricing).
We make Ender Turing; the facts in this section come from our own pages, our Help Center and G2.
The review screen: transcript on the left, the scorecard on the right, one click per point. Quality management →
Cresta
Cresta sells an enterprise AI platform for customer experience: AI Agent answers customers, Agentic Assist guides human agents during the conversation, Deputy Agent automates the work that follows, and Conversation Intelligence analyzes every conversation, with quality management that scores every interaction against custom rubrics (Cresta). Pricing is custom, with no public self-serve tier. Its one published price is on AWS Marketplace, where Cresta is the seller: live assist on voice at $150,000 for 12 months for up to 100,000 calls, or $1.50 per call; chat assist at $150,000 for up to 125,000 chats, or $1.20 per chat; all subscriptions there are non-cancellable and non-refundable (AWS Marketplace). Its integrations include Five9, Genesys, NICE, Amazon Connect, Avaya, Cisco and Twilio (Cresta integrations).
Choose it when: you run large care or sales teams and want AI agents, live guidance and analytics on one enterprise platform. More options: Cresta competitors.
Observe.AI
Observe.AI sells AI agents for customer experience on one platform: AI Agents for Customers resolve inquiries end to end, AI Agents for Frontline Teams guide human agents in real time, and Interaction Intelligence analyzes 100% of conversations and scores quality. It sells to enterprises running large contact centers; pricing is custom, based on deployment scope, with no public self-serve tier (Observe.AI). Its integrations directory lists Five9, Genesys, NiCE, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Twilio and Avaya (Observe.AI integrations).
Choose it when: you want AI agents for customers and frontline teams, and QA, from one enterprise platform. More options: Observe.AI alternatives.
Level AI
Level AI scores 100% of calls, chats, emails and bot conversations, with evaluation, calibration and dispute handling in one QA platform (Level AI quality assurance). Its Agent Assist gives agents in-call guidance, the next-best action and the right knowledge article (Level AI agent assist). It publishes no price list; its pricing guide says deployments combine per-agent pricing, platform licensing and usage components (Level AI pricing guide). Its integrations include Five9, Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Twilio, Dialpad and RingCentral (Level AI integrations).
Choose it when: you want QA, live assist and AI agents from one vendor and score bot conversations next to human ones. More options: Level AI competitors.
CallMiner
CallMiner captures and analyzes 100% of interactions, with fully automated quality forms or a hybrid with manual scoring, and real-time guidance through its RealTime product (CallMiner quality management). It sells bundled packages by user count or interaction volume, for teams from more than 60 agents to global enterprises (CallMiner pricing). Its integration listings include NICE CXone, Five9, Genesys, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Twilio and RingCentral (CallMiner integrations).
Choose it when: speech analytics at large scale is the main job. More options: CallMiner alternatives.
Verint, with Calabrio
Verint sells AI-powered CX automation on top of your existing contact center. Its quality management evaluates 100% of human and automated interactions across channels, and AI Agent Assist helps agents during the interaction (Verint quality). Calabrio is part of Verint: calabrio.com redirects to Verint's workforce engagement pages. verint.com has no pricing page.
Choose it when: you want quality, analytics and workforce management from one enterprise vendor. More options: Verint competitors.
Or use the AI in your contact center suite
If you are choosing a contact center suite, or staying on one, its own quality management and agent assist may cover the job, with no separate AI layer.
NICE CXone
NICE publishes per-agent prices, billed monthly in arrears: the Omnichannel Suite at $110, Quality Management with the Essential Suite at $135, the Core Suite at $169, Interaction Analytics with the Complete Suite at $209, and Copilot for Agents with the Ultimate Suite at $249 plus $0.25 per session (NICE pricing). Auto Score uses generative AI for 100% evaluation coverage (NICE Quality Management).
Choose it when: you want routing, workforce management, quality and live assist on one NICE contract. More options: NICE CXone competitors.
Genesys Cloud CX
Genesys prices per user a month, billed annually: CX 1 at $75, CX 2 at $115 with quality assurance and compliance built in, CX 3 at $155 with full workforce engagement, and CX 4 at $240 with Agent Copilot. Advanced AI features use AI Experience tokens, with some included per organization each month (Genesys pricing).
Choose it when: you run Genesys Cloud and want quality and agent assist on the same contract. More options: Genesys alternatives.
Talkdesk
Talkdesk prices per user a month: Digital Essentials $85, Voice Essentials $105, Elite $165 and Industry Experience Clouds $225, with quality management in every plan. Its AI scoring is QM Assist, an add-on that requires additional licensing, and Copilot, its real-time assistant, is an AI add-on sold through sales (Talkdesk pricing; QM Assist).
Choose it when: you are choosing a suite and want quality management in its base plan. More options: Talkdesk alternatives.
How to choose
- QA and analytics on the phone system you run: compare whether each tool scores every conversation, shows its accuracy against your reviewers, connects to your platform without replacing it and starts scoring without a services project.
- Live guidance first: Balto or Cresta; Observe.AI and Level AI sell it with QA and AI agents on one platform.
- Speech analytics at large scale, or quality with workforce management: CallMiner, or Verint with Calabrio.
- Choosing a suite anyway: NICE CXone, Genesys Cloud CX and Talkdesk each include quality management and sell agent assist.
- A small team: Balto's own FAQ says it may not be the right choice for a team with fewer than 10 agents (Balto FAQ). Ender Turing's free plan covers up to 5 agents, with no expiry.
Switching from Balto to Ender Turing
- What stays: your phone system keeps routing and recording calls, and your scorecard stays yours. Ender Turing connects through its Genesys app, the Five9 connector or the browser extension in NICE CXone, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, RingCentral, Dialpad, Aircall and other web workspaces, or takes recordings through the API, SFTP or upload.
- What changes: every call, chat and email is analyzed and scored on your scorecard from the first calls, with the accuracy against your reviewers shown for every point; required lines are checked on every call; EnderGPT answers questions across all your conversations, in any language. Live prompts during the call come from Ender Assist, in early access, where your telephony runs in the browser.
- What it costs against Balto: Balto sells one plan per seat, counting every user, agents, managers and executives, and publishes no price; its FAQ says the price depends on the number of seats and the contract length. Ender Turing's Team plan, with speech analytics and AutoQA on every conversation at any volume, is $39 per agent a month with no per-evaluation charge; Ender Assist is $0.49 per assisted call in early access, and the free plan covers up to 5 agents.
- How to switch without risk: score the same calls in Ender Turing while Balto runs, compare its scores with your reviewers point by point, and move when the numbers agree.
Frequently asked questions
Who are Balto's main competitors?
Among AI platforms on the contact center: Ender Turing, Cresta, Observe.AI, Level AI, CallMiner, and Verint with Calabrio. Among contact center suites with their own quality management and agent assist: NICE CXone, Genesys Cloud CX and Talkdesk.
How much does Balto cost?
Balto publishes no price list. It sells one plan, Balto Plus, priced per seat, and every user counts: frontline agents, managers and executives. Togo, its voice agent, is priced by the minute (Balto pricing). Ender Turing's prices are on its site: a free plan for up to 5 agents, and Team at $39 per agent a month (pricing).
What does Balto do?
Balto guides agents during live calls with answers, prompts and a checklist, scores every interaction against your scorecard, writes call notes, prepares coaching from each agent's calls and answers routine calls with Togo, its voice agent. It connects to the softphone or contact center you run; it is not a phone system.
Who founded Balto?
Balto was founded by Marc Bernstein, Chris Kontes and Davidson Girard and launched in January 2017. It is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri (Balto AI info).
What companies use Balto?
Balto names Truist, EverBank, Renewal by Andersen, Integris Health, NewRez and BrightBridge Credit Union among its customers (Balto AI info).
Can I keep my phone system and change the AI tool?
Yes. Ender Turing connects to Genesys Cloud, Five9, NICE CXone, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, RingCentral, Dialpad and Aircall, and Cresta, Observe.AI, Level AI and CallMiner each list several of these platforms among their integrations.
Is there a free alternative to Balto?
For QA and conversation analytics, yes: Ender Turing's free plan covers up to 5 agents, 100 calls per agent a month and calls up to 10 minutes, with no expiry. Compare the plans.
