One of the top workshops at ODSC West last year (2018) was a talk by Omar Tawakol, the founder of Voicea. His company created a voice assistant that transformed meetings by handling lower order tasks like note-taking. Cisco acquired Voicea, most likely to integrate it into Webex as part of their Cognitive Collaboration agenda. For you, it could mean a transformation of how you do meetings thanks to speech technologies. Most of our business use case examples center around using chatbots for customer service or Alexa-like assistants.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced its intent to acquire privately-held Voicea, headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Voicea is the creator of a market-leading real-time solution that provides meeting transcription, voice search, and meeting highlights/action items, with robust data privacy. It helps teams have more productive and actionable meetings by turning talk into action. With Voicea technology, Cisco will enhance its Webex portfolio of products with a powerful transcription service that blends AI and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) to unlock the power of any collaboration, like meetings and calls. Our first focus with Voicea is to turn meetings into a treasure trove of digital meeting notes and insights.

EVA's intelligent A.I. algorithms will automatically highlight key moments in conversation like action items and next steps. EVA listens for keywords in speech, but also recognizes intent. You can use voice commands to activate EVA to take notes or silently press the highlight button to not interrupt the flow of conversation. Customize your keywords so EVA highlights specific moments for you and your team.

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.