Voicera Announces Open Beta For An AI That Captures What Matters In Your Meetings

MENLO PARK, Calif., Nov. 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Voicera announces the launch of its free open beta for an in-meeting AI that listens, takes notes and identifies important moments in meetings and captures them as follow up.  Meetings are the most heavily adopted form of collaboration at work and unlike email and IM, they are entirely separated from crucial enterprise workflows. Voicera gains access to meetings through its enterprise voice AI assistant, Eva, which activates those meetings and enables their outputs to impact the people and systems that drive our work.

"Meetings are the most important collaboration tool in the workplace -- more so than email, IM or other collaboration systems -- yet they are the most inefficient, underperforming and effectively siloed portion of our day," said Omar Tawakol, CEO and Co-Founder of Voicera. "Our goal is to integrate meetings into the enterprise workflow and dramatically increase the productivity of both the in-meeting and post-meeting experience. Meetings should be the crucibles where ideas are born, tested, evolved and ultimately gain flight."

Users first engage Voicera with Eva. Eva gathers real-time conversational data by joining your conference call, listening, taking notes and actions in meetings, and surfacing them in the Voicera platform. Users then enter the platform to review, edit and share highlights and pinpoint actions for follow up. Those moments can be gathered from any phone or conference call or directly through Voicera's integration with BlueJeans video meeting platform.   This content can then be shared via Slack and email as well as synched to CRM platforms like Salesforce, whose venture arm, Salesforce Ventures, also invested in the seed round for Voicera. Voicera enables meeting insights, actions and outcomes to be integrated into existing enterprise workflows with ease, turning voice into action.   

Voicera is designed for enterprise interactions that have multiple speakers, require higher accuracy and tighter data-ownership. Voicera developed Eva to work with all existing conference systems, including audio and video as well as direct 1-to-1 phone calls from a user's phone. The intent of integration was to utilize and strengthen existing workflows, and as a result Voicera has created strong partnerships across the conferencing ecosystem.

"BlueJeans is focused on delivering a video meeting experience that our users love, as well as providing a platform and open API's to enable even greater productivity," said Mark Strassman, chief product officer at BlueJeans. "This includes not only great video and Dolby Voice audio, but also integrating innovative meeting technology, such as Voicera's meeting assistant. Voicera's commitment to supporting the workflows of teams aligns strongly with our vision to equip meeting attendees with the tools and features they love while also enabling them to collaborate in more effective, productive ways. The AI capabilities from Voicera, integrated with BlueJeans, accomplish this in a compelling way."

Voicera looks to harness the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee, covering both internal and external meetings. For the first time, it is possible to capture and act on all the high-value customer interactions that occur in external meetings outside a call center. This is what Voicera refers to as voice of the customer. Internal meetings are typical areas of collaboration for teams to work together and engage on the challenges facing their customers, as well as talk about internal challenges and solutions. This is defined as the voice of the employee. These two opportunities are what need to be integrated into existing enterprise workflows and are the most common use cases for Voicera.

Voicera is the perfect tool to span the enterprise, supporting individual employees and sales reps, teams, as well as large-scale enterprise deployments. Because Voicera requires no complicated software installations, awkward mobile apps, or expensive specialized hardware, it is easy to start having more productive meetings, quickly. Eva can be simply added as a participant to meetings, announce its presence and can confirm attendance on the call. Eva quietly tracks the conversation and can be activated with simple voice commands or tap functions from the tool's online dashboard.

Additional features include:

• Frictionless Engagement: Registered users can simply invite [email protected] as a participant to the meeting. Eva can participate in any call with a dial-in and works with most popular conferencing systems. Eva can also be direct dialed to participate in meetings where participants are in the same room.
• Mark & Share: Users can mark any important moment in a meeting and then add team members to access that moment in order to hear the interaction.
• Human-Level Accuracy: Eva will transcribe the most important moments of your call with human level accuracy. Instead of sifting through a long and inaccurate transcript, focus on the parts that matter.
• Meeting X-Ray: Highlights key themes and the direction of a conversation which then links back to audible sections from the call.

Tawakol shares that the company's mission was crystallized after he witnessed a meeting epidemic where employees were attending more meetings, but were increasingly dissatisfied with the output. In the U.S. alone, there are an estimated nine billion meetings a year, where more than 28 percent of that time is considered totally "wasted" by the attendees.

Users can set up a free Voicera account now by visiting www.voicera.com.

About Voicera
Voicera, formerly Workfit, leverages AI technology to harness the power of voice in the workplace and powers Eva, your Enterprise Voice Assistant. Eva is a voice-activated, in-meeting assistant that listens, takes notes and identifies action items & decisions in your meetings. Eva makes it possible for you to be more present in your meetings and focus on collaboration and problem solving rather than taking notes and identifying next steps. Headquartered in Menlo Park, Ca., Voicera is led by veterans from Oracle, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. For more information on Voicera and to sign up for Eva visit www.voicera.com.

Salesforce Ventures
Salesforce is the fastest growing top five enterprise software company and the #1 CRM provider globally. Salesforce Ventures?the company's corporate investment group?invests in the next generation of enterprise technology that extends the power of the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, helping companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world's largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce's innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage Salesforce's expertise in corporate philanthropy by joining Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 250 enterprise cloud startups in 14 different countries since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures.

SOURCE Voicera