Sembly AI boosts workplace productivity with voice AI platform running on Google Cloud

The number of online meetings has skyrocketed as organizations continue to rely on geographically distributed teams or employees who spend some of their time working from home. While virtual meetings helped businesses stay connected during COVID-19 restrictions, they’ve also become an integral part of how people work today and will continue to work going forward. Employees now spend several hours weekly in web meetings and just as much time preparing for meetings or writing follow-up emails.

What if there was a way to spend less time in online meetings and make those meetings more productive? That’s the idea behind Sembly AI, the business that we founded in 2019 with my co-founder Gil Makleff. We both come from a management consulting background where you can be in back-to-back meetings every day instead of focusing on more hands-on work and collaborating with your colleagues more effectively.

That’s where our product, Sembly, makes a difference. It’s a voice AI platform that analyzes conversations in online meetings and generates meeting notes, personalized actions, and other insights for participants and their teams. Our proprietary natural language processing (NLP) models can discern the more productive parts of the discussion, interpret different communication styles, and figure out who needs to do what and by when.

This has enormous potential to boost company productivity and team engagement. Studies across our customers have shown a 7 percent increase in meeting efficiency, a nearly 50 percent reduction in meeting attendees, and hours saved each week on meeting minutes preparation and writing follow-up emails. 

Sembly can also support your sustainability strategy. By reducing the number of attendees, you significantly reduce video processing, audio processing, and network traffic, and therefore the associated CO2 emissions compared with on-camera participation.

The cloud: perfect for a global startup

From day one we’ve been a Google Cloud customer. For a tech-focused start up with global ambitions it’s by far the smartest choice. To begin with, Google Cloud was one of the first clouds to offer flexible GPU compute access which we need to run our AI models. Even though we were a young start-up, Google Cloud made it easy to deploy and manage technology in the cloud.  

Another factor is that we are a small team that needs to be productive and agile all the time. With Google Cloud, you don't need months of training to get up and running even with complex deployments such as ours.

Security is another priority. We handle sensitive client content, and with Google Cloud we only needed a few adjustments to ensure that static data and data sent over our networks is always secure and private. Equally critical, Google Cloud offers geographic coverage for customers worldwide. We can localize our infrastructure easily, especially when the client specifies regional parameters to meet internal and external regulations.

We also qualified for the Google for Startups Accelerator: Voice AI, a 10-week digital accelerator program for Seed to Series A technology startups based in North America. As well as training and technology we were eligible for $100,000 of Google Cloud credits that we invested in an early staging environment and training our transcription engine.

Another advantage in working with Google Cloud was our introduction to SADA, a Google Cloud partner that specializes in global cloud deployments. SADA helped us address the more complex challenges that arise due to rapid growth and scaling requirements. 

Today, we use GKE to deploy and manage containerized applications, Kafka to process and store streaming event data, Google Cloud’s operations suite for monitoring and logging managed services, and PostgreSQL Server as our object-relational database system. We also use Cloud Storage while Compute Engine enables us to create and run virtual machines on our platform. We were able to craft a custom dynamic scaling solution that adjusts the amount of compute active across various parts of our stack based on ongoing and anticipated number of meetings that are processed live in our environment, allowing us to contour our infrastructure capacity to demand, saving significant spend that often arises due to untapped provisioned computing resources.

Streamlining and simplification

For Sembly AI, the most important benefit of Google Cloud is that it simplifies everything: from scaling and maintenance to speed to market with new features. Regulation is another area where Google Cloud simplifies our workflow. Last year we achieved SOC 2 type 1 certification and we are in process to complete our SOC 2 type 2 imminently. As a young business we have limited resources, but Google Cloud streamlines the audit of our security processes and accelerates compliance.  

We are continuing to innovate rapidly at Sembly AI. We have recently introduced multiple language support for French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese and will announce more languages over the coming weeks. Uniquely, Sembly automatically understands which language is spoken and can even handle multiple languages in a single meeting. Sembly also now has an “AI Todo’s” feature, that automatically tracks your todo items from meetings and updates your todo apps accordingly. Additionally, we have recently introduced Semblian, which is effectively “ChatGPT” for meetings – it can answer questions from meetings or even write content such as follow-up emails or the agenda for the next meeting based on what was discussed. There are exciting developments coming soon in the area of meeting notes and work management, where Sembly will offer an unprecedented level of understanding of work that needs to be done following a meeting and help teams manage those work items across their workflow applications.

We’re excited that we can help our customers make the most of the AI workplace revolution. By focusing on people, not just technology, we see countless opportunities to increase workplace productivity, efficiency, and wellbeing. We’re also looking forward to future Google Cloud releases with embedded AI features. At Sembly AI, we have confidence in the unstoppable power of technology to unlock innovation and ideas. Google Cloud enables us to make this happen.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.