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We are all moving so fast these days – it can be a struggle to remain efficient in an over-scheduled world. How many times have you been in a meeting where the notes never got sent out? Or were never taken in the first place? And isn’t it better to have everyone fully engaged in the conversation rather than hastily typing notes? Cisco Webex will soon be making furtive note-taking a thing of the past, while setting new standards for productive and actionable meetings.

Today, we are pleased to announce our intention to acquire privately-held Voicea*, headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Voicea provides a voice collaboration platform powered by an Enterprise Voice Assistant (EVA). EVA is a powerful transcription service that blends AI and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) enabling it to take commands, perform actions and capture highlights in meetings, share them and create actionable recaps. With EVA on conference lines, on calls, or in-person, you can focus on the conversation knowing EVA will capture and share whatever you highlight.

We are excited to welcome the Voicea team into the Cisco Webex family and to get to work introducing EVA across our portfolio of collaboration applications and devices. The possibilities are powerful through combining transcription (EVA) and conversational AI (Webex Assistant) engines. When you combine these two powerful engines you have an intelligent meeting assistant for every one of your meetings. Meetings users can see the live transcription, publish effective meeting summaries and highlights, and also capture and automate action items. Workflows can be pushed automatically through voice commands into systems of record like Salesforce, Trello, Teams, Jira and Asana thereby creating uninterrupted workstreams.

And that’s just the beginning! Imagine how different your meetings and calls can become:

  • When everyone can be engaged in the conversation with enhanced real-time transcription capabilities for a more inclusive workforce. #InclusionIsHappening #InclusiveTech
  • As the conversation is kept going beyond the meeting – think of a transcribed version of your meeting or call showing up in your messaging stream. Continue where you left off! A true interaction continuum.
  • When an understanding of your corporate culture and lingo is brought into AI tools – EVA is a fast learner and, with simple personalization, will learn your corporate acronyms. Think about shorter learning curves and results that are natural and unique to your organization.
  • For those of you who experience FOMO – fear no more! We have you covered. From FOMO to NO-FOMO. #fomo #nofomo #CognitiveCollaboration

Amy Chang, SVP/GM of Cisco Collaboration set out our vision to weave context and intelligence into every aspect of collaboration, saying “It means changing the face of communication and bringing AI/ML enriched context to the user – without them needing to lift a finger”. This acquisition, and more specifically integration of EVA into the Cisco Webex portfolio, represents another major step in cognitive collaboration. We will continue to deliver against this promise to set new standards for the employee experience.

 


*Rizio Inc., is doing business as Voicea

 



Authors

Sri Srinivasan

SVP/GM, Cisco Collaboration