RingCentral Voice Over IP Providers Review

AI Automation and Intelligence

These are RingCentral’s newest features and their entrant into the “AI race.” All three of RingCentral’s VOIP tiers get RingSense AI for Video. This suite of tools provides live transcriptions for meetings, closed captioning for accessibility, video summaries, and video highlights.

AI Assistant Integration

The Core tier now includes RingCentral’s AI Assistant at no additional cost. This feature offers:

• Live transcription of calls and meetings
• Closed captioning
• Meeting summaries with key takeaways and video highlights

The Advanced tier further adds the ability to capture “real-time call notes automatically, reducing manual note-taking during calls.” The Ultra tier includes help drafting, editing, and translating SMS texts.

Internet Fax

Although the industry is moving away from faxes, many lawyers still need to send them to courts, or sometimes even opposing counsel. RingCentral offers the ability to send and receive faxes via its desktop app, mobile app, internet portal, or your email application.

RingCentral Pricing

Through their tiered pricing, some users may be able to limit their purchases based on what they specifically need. For example, Core, RingCentral’s entry-level offering, provides unlimited US/Canada calling, 25 text messages per user per month, unlimited audio conferences, web meetings (up to 100 participants), and integration with Microsoft and Google apps. However, it doesn’t offer internet fax, hot desking, or many of the features that many users will likely find useful. On the other hand, Ultra offers features that allow an office to use RingCentral for most of its communications needs. Before determining which tier is right, RingCentral buyers would be smart to review what features their offices already have in their tech stack.

Business Text

In addition to VoIP and video conferencing, RingCentral offers the ability to send SMS and MMS (except internationally) messages from a business number. The number of monthly messages per user depends on the plan tier (from 25/user/month to 200/user/month). Additionally, one can add the “High Volume SMS” package, which permits unlimited texting at $.01/message. No more texting clients from employees’ personal cell phones.

As a bonus, RingCentral’s text messaging app creates an internal messaging system for team members where they can review past communications, download text strings, and chat with other members in real-time. Although, this feature likely won’t replace #Slack or MS Teams in any substantial way.

RingCentral is ideal for small to medium-sized law firms looking for a one-stop solution for their communications needs. The real value of RingCentral, for lawyers, is as a comprehensive solution. It provides inter-office instant messaging, video conferencing, office phones, business text messaging, and a range of other solutions for the office out-of-the-box. The entire team works in one platform for communication.

However, many attorneys, like those using MS Teams, may find the solutions duplicative of features they already have. And attorneys who don’t have large teams may not see the value in so many communication methods. In that case, they may desire an alternative provider, or entertain the Core pricing tier.