Gartner states that emotion artificial intelligence (AI) systems are becoming so sophisticated that by 2022, personal devices will know more about an individuals emotional state than his or her own family. AI is generating multiple disruptive forces that are reshaping the way we interact with personal technologies.

Conversational marketing captures customer signals in real-time, analyzes inputs, and responds to the user as part of a personalized, contextual, one-to-one engagement strategy. Leanplum said its customers will benefit from new conversational capabilities across every mobile touch point, including push notifications, messaging platforms, digital voice assistants, over-the-top media services (OTT), and more.

“Emerging real-time interaction technologies like voice assistants and bots are championing a marketing shift from one-way broadcasts to two-way conversations,” said Leanplum co-founder and CEO, Momchil Kyurkchiev. “Meaningful relationships between brands and their customers require real-time engagement, across multiple channels, and at different stages of the user journey — all in an automated fashion. With this acquisition, we are excited to strengthen Leanplum’s leadership as the real-time engagement platform for forward-looking brands.”

Connecto CEO Vassil Popovski said the two companies share a common mission to help brands create lasting relationships with the context, relevance, and impact that customers demand. “After becoming a key player in Rakuten Viber’s bot ecosystem and partnering with brands such as Coca-Cola and Visa, we are excited to integrate our extensive IP for Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis into Leanplum’s leading mobile engagement platform,” he said.