DeepAffects

DeepAffects operated as a conversational intelligence platform, founded in 2017 by Prashant Kukde, who served as its CEO. Kukde's entrepreneurial journey began in 2013 with a startup focused on applying AI in healthcare to predict chronic conditions. This experience led him to recognize the challenge of fragmented data and the difficulty in diagnosing psychological issues, which inspired his second startup, DeepAffects, to focus on analyzing voice and human interactions.

The company developed a cloud-based platform utilizing artificial intelligence to analyze business conversations for meaningful insights. It provided an API that allowed developers to integrate features like speaker identification, emotion recognition, and speech enhancement into their own voice-enabled products. The core technology could perform multi-modal emotion recognition by analyzing cues like pitch and intensity from voice, and it could identify individual speakers in a conversation through unique voiceprints. Furthermore, its speech recognition capabilities included accent detection to accurately transcribe audio from non-native English speakers. The platform targeted a range of applications, including call centers, healthcare apps, and meeting transcription services.

The business model centered on providing this AI-driven voice intelligence as a service, enabling clients to measure conversational metrics such as talk-to-listen ratios to gauge engagement and productivity in meetings. By processing audio, text, and video files from collaboration tools, the platform delivered analytics on team dynamics and performance. In December 2020, DeepAffects was acquired by RingCentral, a provider of cloud communication and collaboration solutions. The acquisition was a strategic move for RingCentral to incorporate DeepAffects' AI capabilities into its video meeting and contact center products, aiming to enhance pre-meeting, in-meeting, and post-meeting experiences for its users. The terms of the acquisition, which closed in the fourth quarter of 2020, were not publicly disclosed.

Keywords: conversational intelligence, emotion recognition, speech analytics, voice biometrics, AI-driven voice platform, speaker identification, sentiment analysis, business conversation analysis, RingCentral acquisition, Prashant Kukde, voice intelligence, conversation analytics, speech-to-text, emotional analytics, natural language processing, team dynamics analysis, meeting productivity, contact center AI, voice API, collaboration tools