Business workers spend a significant portion of their time in meetings, but often don’t have much to show for it. Workfit Inc. believes that the solution lies in artificial intelligence.

To put its theory to the test, the Menlo Park, California-based startup has closed a $5.5 million investment from a group of backers that included the investment arm of Salesforce.com Inc., Battery Ventures and Greycroft Partners. Workfit will use the capital to jumpstart the adoption of its virtual assistant, Eva, which can record meetings and make the key highlights accessible through a dashboard for future reference.

The console enables workers to search a recording just as they would a Word document. When a certain keyword is entered, Eva automatically brings up all the instances where it’s mentioned along with a percentage indicating its confidence in the accuracy of the match. The goal is to help workers avoid losing track of the different items brought up during a discussion so they can act upon them later.

It’s the same concept that Chorus.ai Inc. has implemented in its call analysis service, which recently attracted $16 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures and Emergence Capital. But whereas its offering is specifically geared towards salespeople, Workfit appears to be targeting a much broader range of users.

Another way that the startup is looking to set itself apart is by providing voice controls designed to let workers quickly make use of information in recordings. Eva can be instructed to schedule follow-ups, pull records from a company’s customer relationship management system and add new details gleaned during a meeting. Workfit chose to implement the virtual assistant entirely in software instead of in a physical device such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Echo, which means that it’s accessible for remote meeting participants.

The startup plans to make Eva available for companies on its waiting list sometime in the spring. In the meantime, Worklift will use the funds from today’s investment to bolster its team, which is led by co-founder and Chief Executive Omar Tawakol. The entrepreneur previously launched BlueKai, an audience data exchange for marketers that was bought by Oracle Inc. in 2014 for an estimated $400 million.

Source: StockSnap