RingCentral AI: Features, pricing, and limitations you should know

If you’re evaluating RingCentral as your business phone platform, you’re likely wondering what RingCentral AI features are available. 

Yes, RingCentral offers AI features in its business phone platform. They’re available in three different packages. First, you can use RingCentral’s AI Assistant in RingEX plans. This assistant offers features like call and video meeting transcription, SMS thread summaries, and writing and translating texts. Second, you can use RingCentral’s AI Receptionist, or AIR, to handle incoming calls. This feature is available as a standalone offering or as an add-on to RingEx. Finally, you can get RingCentral’s AI Conversation Expert, or ACE. It offers AI-powered conversation insights, call coaching, and comprehensive call summarization.  

In this article, we’ll look at RingCentral’s pros and cons, including AI and standard features, where it shines, and where it falls short. We’ll also look at a top alternative that may work better for your business needs.

RingCentral AI features: A complete breakdown

RingCentral has three main artificial intelligence offerings: RingEX AI Assistant, AIR, and ACE. These sound great in theory, but you’ll want to take note of their costs and limitations before signing up.

1. RingEX AI Assistant

The RingEX AI Virtual Assistant is RingCentral’s built-in productivity helper that’s bundled with their business phone platform. It transcribes phone calls, helps write text messages, and recaps team chats. It can even translate for your international customers.

Here are the virtual assistant features you can find in each of RingEX’s plans:

• Core: $20 per user per month
  • AI video meeting transcriptions, translations, and summaries
  • Phone call transcription, real-time note-taking
  • Unread message summaries
• Advanced: $25 per user per month
  • SMS drafting and editing
  • SMS translation
  • Writing SMS messages to team threads
  • Team message translation
• Ultra: $35 per user per month
  • Real-time notes for calls that take place on hardphones

2. RingCentral AI Receptionist

RingCentral’s AIR offers 24/7 AI phone answering services that can: 

• Schedule appointments
• Answer common questions
• Route calls to your team

You can customize its personality to match your communication style and use its automated SMS feature to answer specific customer inquiries.

Here are some of the key features you can find in RingCentral’s AI Receptionist:

• 24/7 call handling with automatic call routing
• Appointment scheduling, lead capture, and SMS follow-ups
• Multilingual conversational support
• Call queue integration
• SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant

AIR is available in two RingCentral packages:

1. Standalone: $49 per month, includes 100 minutes of call time
2. Bundled: $39 per month for 100 minutes of call time, bundled with RingEX Core

Before you sign up for an AIR plan, keep in mind a few limitations:

1. Per-minute pricing. AIR charges businesses for every call minute. Once you exceed your included minutes, it charges $0.50 for every additional minute. Further, RingCentral rounds up your calls, even for under-30-second interactions. Here’s a real user review:
   
   “A one-second AI receptionist pickup is considered a full minute. They also got rid of my robocall blocking feature, and I started getting robocalls again. I knew it was deliberate because they knew it would eat up my AI receptionist minutes so they could charge more.” — RingCentral review on Trustpilot
   
2. Lack of call forwarding to AIR. RingCentral call forwarding isn’t flexible enough to accommodate AIR. You can route incoming calls to AIR, but you can’t forward unanswered calls to it. That limits your ability to use AIR as a backup call routing option.

3. RingCentral AI Conversation Expert

ACE is RingCentral’s call analysis tool that records customer interactions and tells you whether your customers sound satisfied, frustrated, or another sentiment. It also updates your CRM automatically and gives your sales team coaching tips based on what happened during calls.

Several of the key features you can find in RingCentral ACE include:

• Coaching and performance analysis
• Deal and call scoring
• Automated summary and highlights
• Multi-level insights and reporting
• CRM and productivity suite integrations

ACE is available as an add-on to your RingEX plans. Pricing starts at $60 per user per month.

Before you sign up for ACE, keep in mind these limitations:

• Add-on exclusive. RingCentral only offers ACE as an add-on to its existing plans. It doesn’t include ACE in any existing RingEX offering. If you want to access ACE features, you’ll have to budget an additional $60 per user per month.
• Gated features. ACE’s conversation intelligence and analysis features are gated behind an add-on. However, these features are often offered by other VoIP providers in their plans. You might end up paying extra for features that you should already be able to access.

RingCentral AI pricing breakdown

With all of RingCentral’s different AI offerings, it can be hard to know which features are available in which plans. Here’s a quick overview of its AI features and where you can find them:

AI feature	Core $20/user/mo	Advanced $25/user/mo	Ultra $35/user/mo	Add-on
RingEX AI Assistant for video
Real-time notes	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Meeting transcriptions	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Closed captioning	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Transcript and caption translation	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Video recording summaries	✅	✅	✅	n/a
RingEX AI Assistant for phone
Closed captioning	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Call transcriptions	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Real-time notes, action items, call history sync on desktop and mobile	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Real-time notes, action items, call history sync on hardphones	❌	❌	✅	n/a
RingEX AI Assistant for SMS
AI Writer: helps write, draft, and edit texts	❌	✅	✅	n/a
SMS text translations	❌	✅	✅	n/a
RingEX AI Assistant for team messaging
Unread message summaries	✅	✅	✅	n/a
AI Writer: helps write, draft, and edit messages	❌	✅	✅	n/a
Team message translations	❌	✅	✅	n/a
Other AI features listed in RingEX plans
AI noise cancellation on HD voice	✅	✅	✅	n/a
Visual voicemail with voicemail transcription	✅	✅	✅	n/a
AI Receptionist, or AIR	Separate paid add-on	Separate paid add-on	Separate paid add-on	✅
AI Conversation Expert, or ACE	Separate paid add-on	Separate paid add-on	Separate paid add-on	✅

Want to know how much RingCentral’s business phone platform and its AI features cost? Here are two scenarios that illustrate how much you might end up spending:

First, let’s take a five-person home services team that wants an AI receptionist for after-hours calls and a shared SMS inbox:

• RingEX Advanced at $25 per user per month x 5 users = $125
• AI Receptionist = $39 per month
• Business SMS Booster = $25 per month
• Total = $189 per month, or $2,268 per year

That works out to $37.80 per user per month, compared to an advertised Advanced plan rate of $25. Neither add-on is included at any RingEX tier.

Second, let’s take a 12-person team that wants Ultra for pooled toll-free minutes and more recording storage. They also want conversation intelligence to coach the sales team and an AI receptionist to catch overflow calls:

• RingEX Ultra at $35 per user per month x 12 users = $420
• AI Conversation Expert at $60 per user per month x 12 users = $720
• AI Receptionist = $39 per month
• Total = $1,179 per month, or $14,148 per year

That works out to $98.25 per user per month, compared to an advertised Ultra plan rate of $35. The AI add-ons cost more than RingEX plans. Upgrading to Ultra doesn’t give the team a discount because ACE and AIR features aren’t included in any RingEX plan.

RingCentral AI limitations

It might seem like RingCentral’s AI product offerings give you everything you need in your business phone. However, there are some major limitations you should keep in mind:

1. No MCP or Claude and ChatGPT integrations

RingCentral doesn’t offer a Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to businesses. An MCP is an open standard that allows AI models like Claude and ChatGPT to connect directly to business tools and data sources. For phone systems, MCP support means an AI model can read call histories, search contacts, pull transcripts, and take action inside the phone platform without custom API development. 

Since it lacks an MCP, you can’t connect your RingCentral workspace to Claude or ChatGPT to help you analyze your calls. If RingCentral had an MCP, you wouldn’t need to sign up for ACE to conduct call analysis. You could simply share your call transcripts and message threads with Claude, and it could analyze them for you. 

2. Unpredictable overage fees 

Each RingCentral AI has a different pricing structure. AIR has a per-minute pricing model. ACE charges teams for every user with access to its features. With such complicated RingCentral pricing, it’s hard to know how much you’ll pay each month. 

Here’s an example to show you how the math works out. A five-person HVAC company adds the AI Receptionist to their RingEX plan. Then a July heat wave hits, and the phone doesn’t stop ringing. AIR handles 200 calls in July, averaging two minutes each, for a total of 400 minutes.

• AIR Base cost: $39 per month for 100 minutes
• Overage fees: 300 minutes at $0.50 per minute = $150
• Total AIR cost for July: $189

The AIR add-on now costs more than 4x its advertised price. It’s also more expensive than RingEX that month.

Real RingCentral users have complained about their monthly bill after they start using RingCentral’s AI features:

“I have been using [Contact] Center for several years. They [offered] me last year to use [the] AI receptionist. Which [they said] will “save me” money in order to avoid hiring a human receptionist. I [followed] the recommendations of the Ring Central supervisor manager, but instead of saving, I ended up paying $1,600 [a] month!! Of course the bill came after the 30-day grace period. And now I’m stuck with this bill for one year. Please do not trust them.” — RingCentral review on Trustpilot

3. Limited AI call recording storage

AIR might seem like a reliable way to capture your incoming calls 24/7. However, RingCentral limits call recording storage to 90 days. That means your AIR call recordings won’t be stored more than three months after they take place. 

Even after recordings disappear from your RingCentral account, you’ll still have access to AI call summaries and transcripts. But you won’t have the full recording context to understand what was discussed. Plus, AI call notes are removed from your RingCentral workspace after 12 months. If you need to store recordings and call notes for compliance and to resolve customer disputes, you should consider a different platform. 

4. Unreliable performance

Another issue you might find with RingCentral’s AI features is performance and reliability. Multiple users have reported having issues with its AI note-taking and translation features.

“The very first time I trusted Ring Central to record and transcribe a client call and provide detailed AI notes, Ring Central totally failed.” — RingCentral user on Trustpilot

“Their AI is not as good as it looks. Still needs work and doesn’t do what they say it does.” — RingCentral user on Trustpilot

If you want to resolve these issues after you sign up, you might find that RingCentral’s customer service isn’t the best either.

RingCentral AI security and privacy: What you should know

RingCentral doesn’t use your data to train its models and doesn’t let third parties train on it either. AI call recording audio is discarded after transcription, message summaries are deleted once read, and drafts aren’t stored. Also, admins can turn the assistant off for specific users.

But if you’re in healthcare or another regulated industry, the AI layer has gaps the phone system doesn’t:

1. HIPAA coverage for the AI Assistant isn’t clear. RingCentral’s HIPAA document names every service its Business Associate Agreement covers. ACE, AI Receptionist, AIR Pro, AI Quality Management, AI Supervisor Assist, and AI Agent Assist all appear. The AI Assistant doesn’t. If you’re a healthcare business, it’s worth double-checking with the RingCentral team whether this is the case. 
2. Certifications cover the phone platform, not the AI. HITRUST applies to RingEX, RingCX, and the RingCentral app. The annual SOC 2 plus HIPAA Security Rule audit covers RingEX and RingCX. You should check with the RingCentral team whether these apply to its AI features, as well as subprocessors. 
3. Nothing flags sensitive data for you. RingCentral’s AI doesn’t recognize or classify special categories of data. You effectively take on the obligation to handle them lawfully. It has no PHI detection or redaction. If a patient shares a diagnosis on a transcribed call, it’ll be included in a stored transcript that outlives the audio.

💡Learn more about whether RingCentral is HIPAA compliant.

RingCentral AI vs other VoIP providers

Curious how RingCentral’s AI stacks up to VoIP providers like Zoom and Dialpad? Here’s a quick comparison:

AI feature	RingCentral	Zoom	Dialpad
Real-time AI call transcriptions	✅	✅, unlimited transcription requires Pro Plus plan or higher	✅
Voicemail transcription	✅	✅	✅
Meeting transcriptions	✅	X, requires separate Zoom Meetings subscription	X, call Sales for details
Real-time analytics and reporting	X, requires ACE add-on	X, call queue analytics requires Zoom Power Pack add-on	✅
AI team SMS summaries	✅	X, requires Zoom Power Pack add-on	X

Get a full comparison of RingCentral alternatives. 

How Quo’s AI compares to RingCentral

RingCentral’s AI features are designed for mid-market and enterprise teams. With Quo, you get access to all the AI features you need in our plans. You don’t need to purchase multiple add-ons to take advantage of our AI features.

Here’s a quick comparison of our AI features compared to RingCentral:

Here’s why Quo offers better value for businesses with our AI features:

1. No call analysis add-on required. Our Claude and ChatGPT integrations are available in the Business plan, and our AI call tags feature is available in the Ultra plan. Between these two features, you can analyze your calls, provide coaching recommendations, and identify ongoing customer sentiment. Unlike RingCentral, you don’t need to pay an additional $60 per user per month to access these types of features. 
2. Transparent AI receptionist pricing. With Sona, you’ll know exactly how much your monthly bill costs. We charge you for every call Sona has, not for every minute. We also won’t charge you for calls shorter than 30 seconds, so spam and robocalls won’t count toward your monthly limit. 
3. Unlimited AI call recording storage. RingCentral call recording has a time-based limit. It doesn’t store recordings after 90 days. This makes it difficult for your team to keep track of conversations for compliance or if a dispute comes up later. This is true of AI call recordings as well. Sona calls are stored in your Quo workspace just like your team’s calls. 

Here are a few reviews from Quo users who switched from RingCentral:

“I switched from RingCentral to Quo for way better pricing, way better customer service, and a phone system that is always improving its functionality to better serve its customers.” — Bob Richey, Owner, Party Magic Entertainment

“I suffered all sorts of headaches for over 15 years using RingCentral, Grasshopper, and other VoIP providers. I am beyond amazed at the quality and service provided by Quo. I couldn’t recommend Quo more — which is why my clients are also switching over to Quo.” — Brent Holweg, Founder, Supersonic Sites

Want to see how else Quo stacks up to RingCentral? Get our full comparison of Quo vs RingCentral.

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