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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. Transcription services are also available from Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Cognitive Services.
Voicera acquired Wrappup, cofounder Omar Tawakol told VentureBeat in a phone interview, to better serve users’ needs during the great many meetings that don’t involve conference call services. Until today, Voicera was only available via conference calls or apps like Skype, Zoom, or Cisco’s WebEx.
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“If you’re sitting in an office with a team of five, everybody was physically present so you didn’t need a conference link, but those meetings are very important and so you just open the app,” Tawakol said.
Starting today, Voicera will be integrated into the backend of the Wrappup app for iOS and Android operating systems to complement the existing service, which combines speech analysis and deep learning to draw action items and keywords from meeting recordings. Wrappup then lets users search text transcripts or search to find key moments in meeting audio.
Updates made as part of the Wrappup acquisition will automate the discovery of action items in meetings from transcripts.
Voicera also acquired Wrappup to reach beyond pure enterprise customers who favor conference call services to anyone interested in converting a recording into a transcript.
Once a meeting ends, Voicera creates a transcript and summaries of conversations that took place during a meeting. After the meeting, insights drawn from notes can be shared with an email or the Voicera Slack bot. Eva can be instructed during meetings to do things like record action items, but the integration of Wrappup will automate the discovery of meeting action items.
Voicera believes that by being available on apps and in calendars, Eva will be positioned to assist in two of the most important places for a meeting assistant.
“By fusing the two, we make it very easy to get into your first meeting with the app so you don’t have to worry about a conference link or anything, but then we also leverage our attachment to the calendar to make it a lot stickier,” Tawakol said.
One member of the Wrappup team will move to the United States to work with Voicera in its Menlo Park, California office. The remainder of the eight-person team will continue to work from Dubai and Ukraine.
