RingCentral is wrapping up 2020 with a new partnership with UC provider Stack8 and its acquisition of DeepAffects to create smarter video meetings.

The UC provider will offer RingCentral’s UCaaS platform to its large enterprise customers around the world. Additionally, Stack8 will provide RingCentral Office. It’s a UC platform that provides cloud-based team messaging, video meetings, and an international cloud phone system.

In addition, the newly formed relationship will expand the capabilities of Stack8’s SMACS UC management platform. It provides built-in business intelligence, out-of-the-box processes, and the ability to customize interfaces based on a customer’s process needs.

The platform aligns with RingCentral’s open platform approach to offer flexibility for partners and customers to create value-added services.

RingCentral’s Sandra Krief

“The global knowledge-based workforce is rapidly evolving to a newly found hybrid modality,” said Sandra Krief, RingCentral‘s vice president of service providers for the Americas. “As such, organizations are gaining huge advantages from cloud-based platforms that enable communications and collaboration from anywhere. We look forward to partnering with Stack8 as they work with multinational customers, and to helping Stack8 expand into new markets.”

This follows other RingCentral partnerships with Vodafone Business, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya and Atos.

DeepAffects Acquisition

DeepAffects provides conversational intelligence that uses artificial intelligence to analyze business conversations and gain insights. It will allow RingCentral to deliver enhanced pre-meeting, in-meeting and post-meeting experiences for customers.

RingCentral’s Anand Esrawan

“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, RingCentral‘s president and COO. “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.”

RingCentral isn’t saying how much it paid for DeepAffects.

The DeepAffects platform recognizes core emotions and sentiments directly from voice. It categorizes the conversations on emotion cues, such as intensity, pitch and more.

The platform also identifies an individual person based on the unique characteristics of their voice. Furthermore, it identifies the speaker at precisely the time they spoke during the conversation.

Finally, the platform recognizes multiple languages to support a global user base.

“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, DeepAffects’ founder and CEO. “We are excited to join forces with RingCentral and empower workforces globally with smarter video meetings.”