Cisco Systems Inc. today announced that it’s bolstering its family of collaboration products with the acquisition of Voicea, the maker of a voice assistant for business meetings.

Voicea, incorporated as Rizio Inc., has raised $20 million in funding since hitting the scene three years ago. Cisco’s venture capital arm contributed to the startup’s Series A round in 2017. Salesforce.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund and Battery Ventures were among the other high-profile investors that backed Voicea.

The Mountain View, California-based startup has developed an artificial intelligence called Eva that can join conference calls to take notes. The assistant transcribes the conversation and enables participants to organize key highlights into an easily browsable list for future reference. Users can instruct Eva to mark an item as important with their voice, which removes the need to scribble notes while a call is ongoing.

Cisco will bake Voicea’s technology into its Webex family of cloud-based collaboration services. The flagship product of the lineup is the Webex Meetings video conferencing tool, which competes with applications such as Microsoft Corp.’s Skype for Business. Cisco also offers versions of the tool for team collaboration, customer support and webinars along with a line of conference call equipment.

Cisco plans to use Voicea to augment the native Webex Assistant it launched earlier this year. The latter feature is a specialized, slimmed-down version of Alexa that enables workers to use voice commands for common tasks such as joining a meeting and calling contacts.

“When you combine these two powerful engines [Voicea and Webex Assistant], you have an intelligent meeting assistant for every one of your meetings,” Sri Srinivasan, the head of Cisco’s Team Collaboration Group, wrote in a blog post. “Meeting users can see the live transcription, publish effective meeting summaries and highlights, and also capture and automate action items. Workflows can be pushed automatically through voice commands into systems of record like Salesforce.”

Cisco expects the acquisition of Voicea to close next quarter. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Acquisitions are an important tool in Cisco’s growth strategy. Last month, the company inked a $2.6 billion agreement to buy Acacia Communications Inc, a major supplier of chips for optical networks. The deal came only weeks after after Cisco scooped up a smaller French company called Sentryo SAS that developed cybersecurity software for protecting industrial equipment.

Photo: Cisco