Voicera Lands $20 Million in Funding, Acquires Wrappup, Launches Mobile Apps
Voicera has been busy. The company makes the enterprise AI voice assistant Eva that automatically transcribes meetings and takes notes for you. Voicera has raised $20 million including an A round of $14.5 million led by e.ventures that closed on March 7, 2018. The money didn’t sit idle for long. Today, the Dubai-based Wrappup announced that it has been acquired by Voicera. Rami Salman, Wrappup CEO, said in a website post this morning:
“Over the last few weeks we have been hard at work rebranding Wrappup as ‘Voicera,’ integrating Voicera’s Enterprise Virtual Assistant, named Eva into the mobile app experience, allowing Wrappup customers to use Eva in online meetings and conference calls.”
That’s not all. Today Wrappup’s work seems to have yielded a new Voicera mobile app for iOS and Android. You can now open the Voicera app and start recording your meeting.
Using Voice AI Technology in the Enterprise
While most of the media coverage today focuses around consumer application of voice assistants, Voicera is focused squarely on the enterprise market. It is a utility for the most common business setting, meetings. The company’s funding round announcement characterized its Eva voice assistant by saying:
“Eva joins meetings and conference calls and through a combination of voice recognition, natural language processing and machine learning provides the attendees with a meeting recording, full transcription and meeting highlights. These highlights and notes can be edited and shared through most of the leading collaboration systems like Slack and Salesforce, as well as via email.”
Eva may not have the ambitious scope of services as envisioned by Microsoft Cortana or IBM Watson, but it does have a more immediate application. I am guessing you have a meeting today and could benefit from Eva without the overhead associated with a large enterprise implementation of Microsoft Teams, Watson’s cognitive rooms or Cisco Spark boards. In 2018, enterprise voice assistants are just starting to make their mark. Voicera’s Eva is a solution to watch. The company made an acquisition today, but is likely to soon become an acquisition target as big enterprise players look to expand their voice AI portfolios.
