RingCentral Acquires DeepAffects Conversational Intelligence Pioneer to Enable Smarter Video Meetings

Creates more engaging meeting experience with emotion recognition, real-time closed captioning, and automatic speaker recognition

BELMONT, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#AI–RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG), a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced that it has acquired DeepAffects, a leading conversational intelligence pioneer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze business conversations and extract meaningful insights. The acquisition is part of RingCentral’s rapid innovation to create smarter video meetings. DeepAffects brings powerful AI capabilities that will enable RingCentral to deliver enhanced pre-meeting, in-meeting and post-meeting experiences for customers.

“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. “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!”

The DeepAffects platform includes some of the following key capabilities:

Multi-modal emotion recognition: Recognizes core emotions and sentiments directly from voice. It categorizes the conversations on the emotion cues, such as intensity, pitch and more, to bring emotional awareness insights to participants.

Multi-speaker recognition and voiceprints: Identifies an individual person based on the unique characteristics of their voice. It also identifies the speaker at precisely the time they spoke during the conversation.

Speech recognition with accent detection: Converts audio to text by applying powerful neural network models. It recognizes multiple languages and variants to support a global user base with an accent-aware speech recognition that can transcribe a non-native English speaker’s audio with very high accuracy.

“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. “We are excited to join forces with RingCentral and empower workforces globally with smarter video meetings.”

The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition closed in Q4 2020 and is not estimated to have a material financial impact for the year ending December 31, 2020.

About RingCentral

RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of cloud Message Video Phone™ (MVP™), customer engagement, and contact center solutions for businesses worldwide. More flexible and cost-effective than legacy on-premise PBX and video conferencing systems that it replaces, RingCentral empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect via any mode, any device, and any location. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with leading third-party business applications and enables customers to easily customize business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.

Contacts

Mariana Leventis

mariana.leventis@ringcentral.com
(650) 562-6545