Goodbye Zoom Doom
HELP for businesses working remotely and struggling with video meeting amnesia could be at hand with Myna, a new service taking a major step by using speech recognition technology to capture calls and create a transcript.
The brainchild of secure speech solutions developer Intelligent Voice (IV), it marks an expansion into a broader ecommerce market for the UK company, an operator in the privacy-sensitive domain with corporate clients such as the police, government, insurers and banks.
Spin-off Myna fledged during lockdown as remote workers, whose numbers in Britain tripled last year, have struggled with online meeting fatigue, aka Zoom Doom.
“There seemed a gap in the market to allow people to capture any call and have the transcript emailed as an attachment for review at their leisure,” says IV co-owner and chief technical officer Nigel Cannings, right. “Some platforms offer a recording option but it needs the host to access it. Even if you could get hold of it, it sits in a cloud repository owned by someone else.”
Devised as a productivity tool for small and mid-size firms, Myna was spun out of IV’s technology and works on a £6 per person monthly subscription basis.
“Our bespoke SmartTranscript technology reads the transcript to find out what is more important, bundles the video, transcript and those useful things said into a file, enabling easy cross-referencing,” says Cannings. “Myna was born so people who could get recordings could have them processed into something more usable. For people who can’t get recordings it offers them an easy, calendar-based way to capture the calls and then have them processed into something more useful.”
Building a consumer product was new territory for the company and took four months for Londonbased IV that is seeing 30 per cent annual growth. Turnover is predicted to be £18 million in 2023 with Myna making up 30 per cent of revenues. IV, currently employing 25 people, is now creating 10 new jobs.
“Myna is not following the herd and trying to make cold-calling ‘more effective’,” says Cannings. “It is designed to help people faced with information overloads manage better.
“Since lockdown our core business has expanded but we’ve also been working with more tele-health providers, helping them gain insight into doctor/patient interactions.”
Started in 2008, IV’s owners include Nigel’s father Bill Cannings, who introduced the first PCs into Europe in 1978. Entrepreneur Ben Shellie is another main shareholder.
In 2015 it pioneered the use of NVIDIA graphics processing cards to perform speech recognition. “We see ourselves as a UK company, always looking five years ahead,” says Cannings who is preparing to release new behavioural technology to help in the fight against insurance fraud.
meetmyna.com,intelligentvoice.com