Voice applications for business are benefiting from both new technology advances and user's familiarity with voice recognition and interfaces. Voicera, maker of the Enterprise Voice Assistant EVA, unveiled a number of innovations that further separates its voice collaboration platform from transcription apps and note-taking assistants. The new features, which include an Artificial Intelligence (AI) phone dialer, voice-activated reminders, and visual integrations, help increase productivity from workplace conversations.
Since Voicera launched in the fall 2017, the company has steadily added features that build on the core functions to transcribe and highlight important moments in meetings. The new features, based on user engagement and feedback, help deepen the value to work users, and ensure that no matter where conversations take place, they can be turned into actions quickly and effectively, having a massive impact on business productivity.
With Live Dial, Voicera becomes the first multi-environment solution for taking notes, offering highlights and reminder functionality across any phone call, conference call or in-person conversation. Live Dial integrates Voicera into direct person-to-person phone calls and automatically takes notes while users speak. The new Reminders functionality allows users to prompt Voicera's Enterprise Voice Assistant (EVA) to schedule follow-ups in their calendar during the conversation. For video conferences, Voicera adds Visual Presence, where EVA appears as a participant within the conversation increasing the recognition of an AI taking notes and providing value to anyone present.
"It's simple, our goal is to turn conversations into action, no matter where they take place. Serving workplace conversations in all forms helps us achieve what our growing enterprise user base has been asking for," explains Voicera CEO, Omar Tawakol. "Our users are beginning to use Voicera as their holistic platform for activating conversational data in the enterprise."
Voicera is an AI technology company based in Menlo Park, CA, focused on the utilization of AI technology to harness voice in the workplace, connecting meetings to collaboration systems. Voicera unveiled the market's first voice AI solution for the workplace with its beta launch in November 2017, followed by its first commercially available version of EVA in May 2018.
After months of research and development, Voicera developed Progressive Attention AI, the technology that powers its in-meeting assistant, Eva. "Progressive Attention AI accurately mimics human-level attentiveness by extracting the most valuable moments from a meeting and applying progressively higher computational focus on the moments to produce much more accurate outputs. This methodology performs twice as well as the most popular generic transcription engines currently on the market on real-world noisy meetings," the company explains.
The dual-system artificial intelligence approach, which uses both AI and natural language processing (NLP) systems, mimics human behavioral systems by maintaining two systems: one focused on rapid response, broad-facing, and is always on, while the second system is deeper, deliberate, highly accurate and engages only when necessary.
"The human brain has always had the luxury of constantly scanning its environment while not wasting precious brain resources on every noise. Then when the brain senses something important, it allocates more attention to that particular input from the environment. Without that type of brain, the same person wouldn't be capable of being both a sprinter and a chess player. To the brain this transition from muscle memory to deep thought is easy, but until now - AI has not worked this way," adds Tawakol. "Most AI systems suffer from the 'sophie's choice' of expensive time-consuming processing OR lower accuracy. Progressive Attention AI solves this, by allowing a fast analysis of the environment to identify relevant inputs followed by very deep and focused processing of important moments that can yield a much higher accuracy."
Voicera has been running the Progressive Attention AI on a subset of their users. When surveyed, 77% of users said that having the AI-generated highlights and the ability to share those notes led to more effective post-meeting follow up.
Roughly half of Voicera usage comes from internal meetings, such as project management, team status and candidate interviews with the remainder being external customer-facing calls and meetings. As for the users themselves, adoption overwhelmingly starts with the organizational leaders, with 65 percent of initial users within an organization begin with a leader Director level and above.
"We are thrilled at the progress the team has made," says Tawakol. "We are excited to see Voicera continue to lead the field with innovative solutions, and new features that allow us to deliver EVA in even more environments, including a visual presence and phone calls."
www.voicera.com
