Cisco Webex Gains Voice Assistant Tech Through Voicea Acquisition

Cisco Webex yesterday announced its intent to acquire Voicea, the company that created the Enterprise Voice Assistant (EVA). Designed for meetings and conferences, EVA can listen in on a meeting or call, take notes, and set reminders so that participants can spend less energy on note taking and more on concentrating on the discussion. EVA can also track meeting assignments and produce actionable results from spoken meeting notes. 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.

Bringing Voicea's artificial intelligence (AI), real-time transcription, and advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) to Cisco Webex will mark one the biggest adoptions of voice assistant technology in the enterprise space. According to Cisco Webex, more than 150 million people use Webex each month, with more than 360 million meetings happening on Webex yearly.

Research firm Gartner Research predicts that, by 2021, 25 percent of digital workers will use virtual assistants on a daily basis—up from just 2 percent in 2019. For small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and startups, this means an opportunity to use a virtual assistant to take care of more repetitive and auxiliary businesses processes. Having this tech as part of a tool like Cisco Webex—a tool that many already use—can only make it more ubiquitous across the industry.

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Sri Srinivasan, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Cisco Webex, said that the Voicea acquisition will actually affect products beyond Webex, including Cisco's Cognitive Collaboration initiative. This initiative is Cisco's evolving effort to leverage various advanced technologies for new collaboration capabilities, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and voice assistants.

"We are excited to get to work introducing EVA across our portfolio of collaboration applications and devices," Srinivasan said. "The possibilities are powerful, through combining transcription [EVA] and conversational AI [Webex Assistant] engines."

Voicea's EVA is already well integrated into Webex, so the functionality will be available to current customers, which is the good news. "You will see a set of capabilities that our existing customers will get out of the box," Srinivasan said. "And there will be additional capabilities that will get added on top of that."

The bad news is that, when the acquisition pushes through, EVA and Voicea's tech will belong exclusively to Cisco Webex. This means previous integrations with competing products will cease, including those with BlueJeans Meetings, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Skype for Business, and Zoom Meeting.

Competition for Voice Tech in the Enterprise

Cisco Webex's Voicea acquisition could kickstart a race for adding smart voice assistant tech in the meeting and conferencing industry. Daniel Newman is Principal Analyst at Futurum Research; he has been following innovations in the conferencing space for some time now. Newman says Cisco has regained a clear top-two market leadership spot in end-to-end collaboration, along with Microsoft.

"So you can expect the followers, as well as Microsoft, to be paying attention to this, and considering potential acquisitions or in-house solutions to compete with Voicea's added capabilities," said Newman. "The conference solutions segment is seeing rapid convergence of productivity, analytics, and AI as meeting waste is targeted and solutions are being developed to get more from meeting time, leveraging technology to help."

"With Voicea's technology, Cisco will enhance its Webex portfolio of products with a powerful transcription service that blends AI and Automated Speech Recognition [or ASR] to unlock the power of any collaboration, like meetings and calls," said Srinivasan. "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."

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EVA by Voicea can respond to spoken commands.

Security and Privacy for Digital Assistants

Bringing voice assistant tech into a mainstream product such as Cisco Webex requires educating users on the benefits of automated speech recognition, real-time transcription, and AI in the workplace. With an increased awareness of security and privacy, Cisco Webex, through its acquisition of Voicea, has the unenviable task of promoting the tech as safe and privacy focused.

Given the recent voice assistant privacy breaches in the consumer space, business and enterprise solution providers need to double down on how voice and transcribed data is handled securely.

"When you bring Voicea into Webex, it gets encompassed into the Webex Security Cloud. All your meeting information is stored in a single internal cloud. Your information is not going into any external cloud. We are also providing very intentional controls for privacy for EVA to participate in meetings," Srinivasan said.

"Cisco is vastly more experienced and committed to engineering solutions that consider hardware and software security. Vulnerabilities that Slack and Zoom have seen are possible, but much less likely with Cisco solutions due to the company's deep engineering bench," Newman added. "I believe it is an encouraging move for Cisco Webex. Their investment is a clear sign of commitment to the collaboration portfolio."