Next gen multimodal agents: an interface that morphs with the conversation

We’ve long believed that the conversation is the interface — the customer says what they need, and the agent figures out the rest. But that doesn’t mean it’s limited to voice or text.

Try upgrading your mobile plan over the phone. The rep talks through models, colors, storage sizes, and monthly rates. You’re stuck comparing things in your head, and picking a phone you can’t picture. The call is good for parts of this — you can say what you actually need and ask questions more easily than over text. But you can’t see the thing you’re about to buy.

Sierra’s multimodal agents close that gap, bringing voice, text, and visuals into the same conversation. This way, customers get the best of each medium without having to pick just one.

Stitching those channels together isn’t the hard part. The real trick is knowing which to use when: voice to explain what you need, a visual to compare options side by side, or text when you want to reference something later. Agents built on Sierra anticipate what’s needed for each conversation and automatically shift between modes without making you start over or repeat yourself.

The best interface is the one the conversation needs

Say your flight gets disrupted. You call the airline to get a new flight, and instead of a rep reading off alternate options one by one, you see them laid out with departure times, layovers, and pricing, right in the conversation. You pick one, and the agent keeps going from there.

Choosing a seat works the same way — you see the map and tap the seat you want.

And for times when it’s easier to talk than type, you can switch to voice and explain exactly what you need. The agent captures those details without making you type a paragraph into a text box.

One agent, every surface

With Sierra, you can build your agent once and easily deploy across all channels. The same goes for multimodal agents: once you build a visual component, your agent can use it everywhere it lives.

That approach also applies to Sierra’s MCP UI integration, which lets you bring interactive components like product cards, comparison tables, calendars, and forms directly into the conversation. Your team designs and hosts those components, so you decide how they look, what they show, and when they change. When you make an update, it’s automatically reflected everywhere without needing to redeploy or maintain different versions for each platform. And when something needs more room, it can expand to full screen to show calendars, long comparison tables, multi-step forms, and more.

Customers don’t have to choose

On one call, customers can talk through what they need, glance at a screen to compare their options, and tap to confirm — without ever pausing the conversation to switch tools. With Sierra, multimodal experiences like these are as easy to build and deploy as they are for customers to use.