Cisco announced its intent to acquire privately-held Voicea, headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Voicea is the creator of a market-leading real-time solution that provides meeting transcription, voice search, and meeting highlights/action items, with robust data privacy. It helps teams have more productive and actionable meetings by turning talk into action.
With Voicea technology, Cisco will enhance its Webex portfolio of products with a powerful transcription service that blends AI and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) to unlock the power of any collaboration, like meetings and calls. Our first focus with Voicea is to turn meetings into a treasure trove of digital meeting notes and insights. Attendees and non-attendees can quickly gather the most relevant information from these digital notes and insights, turning a block of text into actionable information.
This acquisition reflects Cisco's vision of Cognitive Collaboration, interoperability, and workplace transformation through combining the power of AI, ML, software, hardware, and the network to remove friction and get work done faster and smarter.
The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2020, subject to customary closing conditions and required regulatory approvals. Upon completion of the transaction, the Voicea team will join the Webex portfolio team, led by Sri Srinivasan, Senior Vice President and General Manager.
Cisco collaboration customers include 95 percent of the Fortune 500 of which more than 130 million people use Webex every month and over 360 million meetings take place on Webex each year.
"Voicea's true market leading technology will be a game changer for our Webex customers to experience more productive and actionable meetings," said Amy Chang, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Collaboration.
"The acquisition of Voicea allows us to leap past basic transcription services and instead, continue delivering on our vision of AI-driven, Cognitive Collaboration across our entire portfolio."