September 24, 2019 by Siobhan Climer and Igor Nayshtut
After a string of almost weekly acquisitions, Cisco is adding yet another technology to its collaboration practice. In an August 6th announcement, Cisco acquires Voicea, a California-based artificial intelligence voice assistant development company.
What Is Voicea?
Voicea, which launched in 2016, developed EVA, a voice assistant built with artificial intelligence capable of joining meetings, taking notes, identifying action items, and sharing these insights with specific units.
The selling point of Voicea is “turning talk into action”. Meetings are notorious for wasting time. By providing a real-time solution that transcribes and enables voice search, while also highlighting action items, Voicea enables meeting participants to engage fully and thoughtfully in purpose-driven activities.
Cisco Acquires Voicea: Cognitive Collaboration
It’s no secret Cisco is building a vision for what they call Cognitive Collaboration. The idea is to generate an intuitive network of technology, backed by artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, to create a seamless experience for Cisco Webex users.
Voicea is yet another example of Cisco’s investment in the Webex portfolio. Just recently, Cisco Webex launched People Insights to empower Webex users to see rich, contextually relevant professional data on the people with whom they are interacting.
Read more about the People Insights functionality here.
People Insights: Improve Collaboration With Context In Cisco Webex
Why Cisco Webex?
While Cisco is eyeing the future, today’s Webex users are treated to an entire collaboration platform that boasts simple unified communications, video conferencing, team messaging, and web meetings – making it the platform of choice for professional organizations.
Use Webex Teams for an all-in-one cloud-based business collaboration and communication platform to meet a growing demand for flexible anytime-anywhere work. Document sharing, whiteboarding, huddle spaces, and robust communications through Webex improve community and collaboration.
What’s Next For Webex?
Cisco’s acquisition of Voicea is only a stepping-stone to building an AI-based collaboration portfolio that simplifies meetings and conferencing by delegating the most challenging and repetitive aspects to technology. By removing the obstacles that humans are so good at creating, Cisco hopes to help people build more productive, collaborative work environments that work together to make a better world.
Read the full statement by Cisco on the acquisition here.
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About The Authors
Igor Nayshtut is the Collaboration Practice Manager at Mindsight, an IT Services and Consulting firm located in the Chicago area. With over 20 years of experience in information technology, specifically around Unified Communications, Igor has helped organizations understand the complexities around collaboration. Igor’s expertise lies in strategically designing collaboration and unified communication systems that improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and help businesses meet their objectives.
Siobhan Climer, Science and Technology Writer for Mindsight, writes about technology trends in education, healthcare, and business. She writes extensively about cybersecurity, disaster recovery, cloud services, backups, data storage, network infrastructure, and the contact center. When she’s not writing tech, she’s reading and writing fantasy, gardening, and exploring the world with her twin daughters. Find her on twitter @techtalksio.