As we discussed in previous No Jitter posts, COVID-19 has sent healthcare, local government, and other customer service operations into a tailspin, with physical contact centers shutting down just as they need to deal with a barrage of questions around the disease. In response, contact center providers are scrambling to help these customers spin up home-based operations and deal with unanticipated call volumes. In a recent interview with No Jitter, Omar Tawakol, VP and GM of Cisco Contact Center, shared how Cisco is helping businesses get up and running quickly with its cloud platform, Webex Contact Center; support remote agents; and deflect calls onto AI capabilities to ease the load on live agents. Over the last couple of weeks, Cisco has helped one customer shift 10,000 agents into a work-from-home scenario, and another bring on 1,000 agents to answer COVID-19 questions coming in from around the country, he cited as just two of many examples. All told, Cisco provides contact center technology to over 36,000 customers (on-prem plus cloud) and hosts 3.6 million agents globally, many of are overwhelmed by the global pandemic, Tawakol said.

Take, for example, EVA, a "digital voice assistant" created by Silicon Valley startup Voicea. The AI agent can automatically read users' calendars, dial itself into their meetings, and use natural-language processing algorithms to create real-time transcripts of what's said. As a meeting progresses, EVA can also respond to voice commands ("EVA, add that to my to-do list") and "trigger" words ("that's a good point") to highlight what's most important. In an interview, Voicea CEO Omar Tawakol described the technology as a way to help the masses employ the same listening and learning skills as top executives. "Really good CEOs are 100 percent focused on their conversations, not looking at a screen," Tawakol said.

At Transform, an AI-focused event held by VentureBeat in Mill Valley, California, Google VP Scott Huffman, who is in charge of engineering teams for Google Assistant, shared some insights into what it takes to create lasting experiences with voice assistants. For example, becoming part of a person's daily routine helps drive adoption, and Google Assistant commands like "Create a reminder" or "Play music" are 40 times more likely to be action-oriented than a Google search query. Huffman did a great job of sharing unique insights from a platform perspective, but that's just one side of the story. On the other side are a host of developers, startups, and service providers making their own third-party experiences that work alongside Google Assistant or Alexa. Below is some tried-and-true advice for successful voice computing from three veterans in the industry. Perhaps more than any other portion of the tech industry, bots and artificial intelligence have made great strides in the past few years, while simultaneously suffering from overmarketed and even false claims.

Voicera today announced it has acquired Wrappup to expand its meeting assistant Eva to the AI note-taking app for Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Voicera has raised $20 million from some of the biggest names at the intersection of enterprise and AI, including Microsoft Ventures, Cisco Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and GV, formerly Google Ventures. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cisco and Microsoft both shared plans last year to bring Spark Assistant and Cortana into the workplace and meeting rooms. With millions of G Suite customers and Alexa expanding into the workplace as well, Google Assistant may join other tech companies that want to bring their assistants into offices and meeting rooms.

It seems that everyone agrees that meetings are a time suck. There have been many attempts to use technology to make it easier to organize and run them, but Voicera, a Bay area startup, is attacking the problem from a different angle. It wants to make it simpler to record meetings and pull out action items automatically using artificial intelligence. Today, it announced a $20 million Series A from a mix of venture capital firms and big-time enterprise investors. For starters on the venture capital side, the round was led by e.ventures with participation from Battery Ventures, GGV Capital and Greycroft.

The next assistant in many offices could be named Alexa or Cortana. In 2016, Silicon Valley obsessed over how text-based bots in apps like Slack could make employees more efficient, turning complicated tasks or forms into conversational texts. Now, following the success of Amazon Inc.'s Alexa and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Home, people in the technology industry are increasingly thinking about how such voice-activated devices can be made useful in the workplace. The workplace offers challenges that experts say intelligent assistants built for home use so far haven't effectively met, mostly in the area of voice recognition. Workers at Goodwinds Inc. in New York City, for example, have used an Amazon Echo attached to the office ceiling for such tasks as adding events to their calendars and setting reminders for meetings, says Vinay Patankar, chief executive of the workflow-management startup.

The next assistant in many offices could be named Alexa or Cortana. In 2016, Silicon Valley obsessed over how text-based bots in apps like Slack could make employees more efficient, turning complicated tasks or forms into conversational texts. Now, following the success of Amazon Inc.'s Alexa and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Home, people in the technology industry are increasingly thinking about how such voice-activated devices can be made useful in the workplace. The workplace offers challenges that experts say intelligent assistants built for home use so far haven't effectively met, mostly in the area of voice recognition. Workers at Goodwinds Inc. in New York City, for example, have used an Amazon Echo attached to the office ceiling for such tasks as adding events to their calendars and setting reminders for meetings, says Vinay Patankar, chief executive of the workflow-management startup.

Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking the weather on Google Home or Amazon Echo. Battery Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Salesforce Ventures and a number of angels joined together to finance a $5.5 million seed investment in the startup. Workfit's announcement is underscored by a general uptick in activity around conversational AI for enterprise. Amazon's Alexa, perhaps the most enterprise-friendly of the popular conversational tools available today, boasts integrations with companies like Hipchat and Sisense for both team collaboration and data recall. Of course, the reality is that most meetings are not limited to a single conference room and even fewer have an Echo listening in.