RingCentral Acquires Conversational Intelligence Pioneer DeepAffects

RingCentral, a provider of cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, has acquired DeepAffects, a conversational intelligence provider, for an undisclosed amount.

DeepAffects brings to RingCentral artificial intelligence capabilities that will enable the company to deliver pre-meeting, in-meeting, and post-meeting experiences for customers The DeepAffects platform includes multimodal emotion recognition, multispeaker recognition and voiceprints, and speech-to-text conversion with accent detection.

"As businesses shift to a hybrid model with employees working both in office and remotely, it has never been more important to equip them with tools and insights that make meetings more engaging and productive," said Anand Eswaran, president and chief operating officer at RingCentral, in a statement. "With DeepAffects, we will bring conversational speech analysis and emotional sentiment recognition to our platform to deliver a differentiated, best-in-class meetings experience for our customers. We're thrilled to welcome the DeepAffects team to RingCentral."

"With a rich set of AI models and high accuracy for diarization, emotion, and speech recognition, DeepAffects is truly a market leader in providing conversational intelligence and analysis," said Prashant Kukde, founder and CEO of DeepAffects, in a statement. "We are excited to join forces with RingCentral and empower workforces globally with smarter video meetings."