I run across dozens of new apps a week that I kind of tuck into my toolbox for later examination. But every once in a while, a tool like Eva by Voicera comes along, and I put it to use immediately.

In a word… wow!

Voicera is the company that created “Eva,” an artificial intelligence meeting recorder that will change how you’re meeting with people. When I found it on Product Hunt yesterday morning at about 5 a.m., I immediately found ways to use it at three meetings scheduled for the day.

Watch the Overview

What Eva Is

At its basic core, Eva is a voice recorder. You can invite her to dial in to teleconferences or simply call her during a meeting, and she will record the audio. But with the addition of artificial intelligence speech recognition tools, Eva “listens” for key words during your meeting, such as words related to action items, follow up tasks, numbers, people, etc. After your meeting is over, the AI tools scan the recording for those words and pull out the audio highlights.

How Eva Works

Sign up for Eva with Google, Microsoft or a separate account. Then you’ll get access to the Eva phone numbers and email, and that’s all you need to get going. If you have a teleconference with a dial-in number, you can add the Eva email to the invite list, and she’ll dial in all by herself. Or you can use the phone number to call her, and she’ll sit there as a silent participant.

While you’re having your meeting, you can either ignore her completely and just let her do her thing, or you can actively create highlights with voice commands (Ok, Eva) or by keeping the Voicera page open on your screen and tapping the highlight buttons whenever you want.

AI Analysis

After your meeting, Eva takes a few minutes to process your audio. When she’s done, you’ll discover that she has created a searchable word cloud of the major topics plus a list of action item words, number references, question references and more. You can also listen to the whole meeting, add collaborators and continue to search for meeting points.

A Couple of Cons

It’s hard to find fault with such a wonderful tool that is offered for free (they say it’ll go to $10 per user per month), but I found a couple of quirks. I was disappointed the couple of times I tried to say “Ok, Eva” or whatever to prompt her to highlight a segment. I had better luck when I used the website and clicked the highlight buttons (20 seconds forward or back) while we were talking.

I also had trouble with the agenda feature. The tool says that if I create one, Eva will use it to pull out more highlights, but I had issues both creating and using the agenda.

Voicera in the Future

As I mentioned, the tool is in beta. They expect that the pricing will start at $10 a month. And they promise that in the future you’ll receive a summary of the call with key words and highlights sent to you automatically.