Vonage is buying Over.ai’s technical team and intellectual property from i.am+, an AI technology platform co-founded and co-owned by musician will.i.am.

With this talent acquisition, Vonage said it gains significant technology talent and expertise in conversational-related AI. Over.ai is a provider of voice AI for business and contact centers.

Over.ai’s product and engineering team of 23 will join Vonage’s R&D technology hub in Tel Aviv, expanding Vonage’s Tel Aviv R&D team to more than 100 high-tech professionals.

Omar Javaid, president of Vonage’s API platform group, tells Channel Partners that combining Over.ai’s technology with the OneVonage platform presents a “tremendous opportunity for our partners to create new, cutting-edge customer experiences, extending the needs and use cases our partners are able to address for their customers.”

Vonage’s Omar Javaid

“This empowers both our partner and developer ecosystem by bringing new capabilities and depth to our platform, over time,” he said.

Over.ai’s voice and conversational AI technology platform provides intelligent virtual assistant functionality via APIs, allowing businesses to enhance their interactive voice response (IVR), handle complex interactions with real-time human-like interactions over phone lines, and lower operational costs while significantly improving service, according to Vonage.

Vonage will incorporate the Over.ai voice over AI technology, including its proprietary speech, to text and natural language understanding (NLU) algorithms, to accelerate the company’s capabilities for its flagship applications including the Vonage Business Cloud (VBC) UC solution and the NewVoiceMedia contact center solutions. The Over.ai technology also will help Vonage accelerate its API Platform’s depth and capabilities.

“We’ve seen an increased demand for speech to text and NLU algorithms, with the goal of making every conversation smarter,” Javaid said. “With this ‘aqui-hire,’ Vonage will be bolstering these capabilities in our solutions. This will in turn allow us and our partners to drive exceptional customer experiences by providing a premiere service for every interaction, reducing wait times to zero and resolving customer issues quickly and effectively using natural language conversation.”

“At Over.ai, our technology was built on the belief that in order for organizations to meet the digital age with intelligence, humans and machines must learn to work together,” said Noam Fine, Over.ai’s co-founder and CEO. “We are excited to join Vonage at such an exciting time as they are disrupting the massive cloud communications market. Combining our AI technology with the award-winning OneVonage platform presents a tremendous opportunity to create new, amazing customer experiences.”