Kaltura Introduces Real-Time Emotional Intelligence for Agentic Avatars, Enabling More Natural AI Interactions Across Marketing, Sales, Training, and Learning
New and improved capability allows Kaltura's Agentic Avatars to interpret user tone and conversational intent in real time, responding with synchronized facial expressions and vocal nuance to drive deeper engagement across enterprise use cases
New York, New York, Aug. 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kaltura (Nasdaq: KLTR), the Agentic Digital Experience company, today introduced real-time emotional intelligence for its Agentic Avatars, allowing them to interpret a user's tone and conversational intent as interactions unfold and respond instantly with synchronized facial expressions, vocal nuance, and emotional resonance.
As AI agents and avatars become mainstream across customer service, sales, marketing, learning, and internal communications, organizations are discovering that deployment alone does not guarantee impact. The quality of the interaction determines whether users engage deeply or abandon quickly. Increasingly, success depends not only on what an avatar knows, but on how naturally it communicates.
Research consistently shows that humans make trust and engagement decisions within seconds based on non-verbal cues. When an AI interaction feels flat or emotionally disconnected, users disengage, completion rates drop, and the business value of the deployment erodes. Emotionally intelligent avatars bridge this gap by understanding how a user is communicating, not just what they are saying, creating interactions that feel more engaging, empathetic, and effective.
Kaltura's emotionally intelligent avatars are designed to strengthen outcomes across the full range of agentic digital experiences:
ABM and Demand Generation
In account-based marketing, personalization at scale has always been the challenge. An avatar that interprets a buyer's tone can shift from informative to reassuring to enthusiastic as intent changes, making the interaction feel less like a broadcast and more like a conversation with someone who is actually listening. When deployed through Kaltura's Agentic Revenue Engagement platform, which combines PathFactory's (a Kaltura company) content intelligence with Agentic Avatars, emotionally responsive interactions turn static ABM pages and digital sales rooms into dynamic, buyer-adaptive conversations that accelerate pipeline progression.
Customer Experience and Support
In support scenarios, users often arrive frustrated or confused. An avatar that recognizes distress signals in tone and responds with visible empathy, patience, and reassurance can de-escalate situations faster, increase resolution rates, and build lasting trust. The difference between a robotic FAQ response and an emotionally attuned interaction often determines whether a customer stays or churns.
Training, Learning, and Compliance
For employee onboarding, professional development, and compliance training, engagement is the primary predictor of retention and application. Emotionally intelligent avatars adapt their delivery based on learner state: offering encouragement when confidence drops, expressing enthusiasm when breakthroughs happen, and adjusting pace when confusion signals arise.
Roleplay Simulation and Sales Enablement
In Kaltura's avatar-powered roleplay simulations, avatars can act as skeptical prospects, frustrated customers, or demanding executives, enabling employees to practice difficult conversations in realistic scenarios. Rather than following a fixed script, the avatar responds naturally to how the conversation unfolds, expressing genuine skepticism, impatience, or warming engagement as the learner improves. This creates training that closely mirrors the emotional unpredictability of real interactions.
Personal Tutoring and Coaching
For one-on-one tutoring and coaching scenarios, emotional resonance transforms the experience from transactional to relational. A tutor avatar that shows genuine interest, celebrates progress with visible enthusiasm, and responds to struggle with patience and concern creates the psychological safety that enables deeper learning.
Kaltura's Agentic Avatars dynamically adjust their facial expressions throughout a conversation, responding in real time with expressions that convey empathy, concern, enthusiasm, surprise, or skepticism based on the user's tone, conversational intent, and context. Rather than maintaining a static expression or relying on pre-scripted transitions, the avatar continuously adapts as the interaction evolves.
The capability is powered by Kaltura's proprietary anchor-based diffusion rendering architecture. The system defines emotion anchors, pre-captured reference representations of the avatar expressing specific emotions (happy, empathetic, concerned, surprised, skeptical), and uses latent-space interpolation to blend between them in real time. This approach generates smooth, natural transitions rather than jarring jumps between discrete emotional states.
Critically, the architecture provides fine-grained intensity control: each emotion operates on a continuous spectrum from subtle to pronounced, allowing the avatar to express a slight smile of encouragement or a full expression of enthusiasm depending on conversational context. Because every rendered expression is grounded in validated anchor points rather than generated from scratch, the system avoids the "hallucinated expressions" problem common in purely generative approaches, ensuring that emotional responses always appear natural and believable at ultra-low latency.
"Human conversations rely on much more than words," said Dr. Alan Bekker, CTO at Kaltura. "Tone, facial expression, and emotional context all influence how people interpret an interaction. By enabling avatars to respond to those signals in real time, we are making conversational AI feel significantly more natural while helping organizations build trust and drive deeper engagement across every touchpoint, from the first marketing interaction through ongoing customer success."
The new capabilities build on Kaltura's strategy to power agentic digital experiences across the enterprise. Over the past year, Kaltura expanded its conversational AI platform through the acquisitions of eSelf.ai, a company specializing in photorealistic conversational avatars, and PathFactory, a leader in AI-powered content intelligence and buyer journey orchestration. Last month, Kaltura was recognized by ISG Research as an Exemplary Provider for Conversational AI.
Watch how Kaltura’s Agentic Avatar interprets tone, responds with natural emotional expressions, and transforms every conversation into a more human, engaging experience in this video.
About Kaltura
Kaltura's mission is to power rich, agentic digital experiences across organizational journeys for customers, employees, learners, and audiences. Its platform combines intelligent content creation, enterprise-grade content management and intelligence, and multimodal conversational engagement capabilities. Kaltura serves leading enterprises, financial institutions, educational institutions, media and telecom providers, and other organizations worldwide. For more information, visit www.kaltura.com.
Nohar Zmora SVP Marketing at Kaltura pr.team@kaltura.com
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