Cisco has unveiled what it says is the world’s first AI- powered voice assistant for meetings. The announcement was made during the Cisco Partner Summit. The service will be available first on the Cisco Smart Room Series portfolio, including the new flagship Cisco Spark Room 70, also seeing its debut.
Cisco Spark Assistant
The new assistant, built with machine learning system from MindMeld, which Cisco bought earlier this year, will let people control their work meetings with their voice, with a smart system set to improve over time. The service will be released in phases, starting from early next year, with the first stage serving as a trial for the next ones. In the first phase, a small group of customers will be able to use voice commands to start a meeting, join their own Cisco WebEx personal meeting room or one of their co-workers' rooms, call anyone within the organisation, and end the meeting, without needing to type of dial.
With feedback, the system will be able to do more. For example, it will be able to assign action items and create meeting summaries. The system uses speech recognition technology, natural language understanding, question answering and dialog management. Paired with the new Cisco Spark Room 70, the Spark Assistant will also let users know who enters the room, who leaves the room and who is speaking.
Cisco Spark Room 70
The new Cisco Spark Room 70 replaces Cisco’s top-selling video system MX800. Just as Cisco Spark Assistant will take on more tasks over time, it will also be available across all Cisco Spark clients and hardware devices over time. Cisco Spark Room 70 features 70 inch 4K screens, with both single and dual screen models, an award-winning industrial design plus audio and video, and quad 5k cameras, doubling the number of cameras in the MX800, in half the space. One of the cameras will capture the entire room at all times, making intelligent framing and best overview highly responsive and human. The cameras also enable face recognition and people count.
The new system features the Nvidia Jetson platform, using AI to build intuitive and intelligent capabilities.
