Vowel: Zoom challenger wants to improve meetings
Video meetings have been a daily companion in the office or home office since the beginning of the pandemic. There are now a number of companies that specialize in this type of communication. Vowel is one of them – and has a big goal.
What began with Skype, especially in the private sector, increased enormously with offers from Google Meet to Zoom, especially during the corona pandemic. In a professional context, there is almost no meeting without colleagues from the home office who are connected via video. In addition to the big players in the video call business, there are also smaller providers such as Vowel who are looking for their place between Zoom and Co.
Vowel itself is a fairly young startup that received start-up funding from investors of $ 4.3 million in October 2020. The company has developed its own meeting platform that enables groups and individuals to plan, host, record or transcribe video meetings. There is also the function to share the meetings, as well as an integrated search feature.
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With transcriptions to more productivity
Vowel wants to offer a central hub where all the requirements that a meeting entails converge. The transcription is intended to save participants from having to take notes during the meeting, as everything can be looked up in the transcribed recording. A common agenda can be drawn up in advance, which enables specific bullet points to be referred to later. In addition, participants can bookmark particularly important points during the meeting, which are later marked in the transcribed minutes.
Vowel uses Google Transcribe for the transcription. Even in complex conversational situations in which people are speaking at the same time, the tool can identify individual speakers and thus ensure that the minutes of the meeting are easy to read. Vowel can be integrated directly into Slack, Jira or in the mail program, where the logs are then displayed. Meetings can also be started directly from Google Calendar.
Further integrations are to follow
When it comes to security, Vowel uses the most modern encryption of Google authentication. This is to prevent unwanted participants from gaining access to the internal meeting minutes. In the course of the year, Vowel wants to expand its integrations with a large number of productivity and team organization apps in order to expand its own target group.
Vowel currently offers a free version that allows calls of up to 60 minutes with a maximum of 25 participants. The business version costs 16 dollars per member and month and allows an unlimited number of participants and does not have a time limit. In addition, access to all past meetings is retained. In the free version, only the meetings of the last 14 days can be viewed.
