Cisco sets to bolster the capabilities of Webex with the acquisition of Voicea, a startup behind a real-time solution providing meeting transcriptions, voice search and meeting highlights/action items.
The financial details of the deal are not available, but recently Voicea received $20 million in funding to further support product development and growth.
As the company puts it, Voicea technology "helps teams have more productive and actionable meetings by turning talk into action." The EVA (or Enterprise Voice Assistant) transcription service blends AI and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) to transcribe any collaboration, such as meetings or calls, creating digital meeting notes users can go through to gather the most relevant information.
“When you combine these two powerful engines [Voicea and Webex Assistant], you have an intelligent meeting assistant for every one of your meetings,” Cisco says. “Meeting 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.”
Post-acquisition Voicea will be folded into the Webex portfolio team under the leadership of SVP Sri Srinivasan. Cisco expects the deal to be finalised on fiscal Q1 2020, following customary closing conditions and regulator approvals.
