Cisco Expands Speech Capabilities as Part of WebEx Upgrades

Today at its WebexOne virtual user conference Cisco announced a wave of Webex innovation to help organizations collaborate seamlessly and transform their employee and customer experiences.

As part of the upgrades, Cisco added noise cancellation and speech enhancements to the meeting app. The speech capabilities include transcription and closed-captioning, the ability to use verbal commands to tell WebEx Assistant to create highlights and action items, the ability to save and share meeting artifacts and recordings, and Webex calling interactive voice response.

Cisco is also working on real-time translation. As of February, WebEx users will be able to participate in their native languages and get localized, real-time transcriptions of the active speaker in 10 languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Dutch, and Japanese).

Cisco also released a number of enhancements to WebEx Contact Center. These include the following:

• A next-generation microservices architecture for rapid feature innovation;
• Open APIs for easy customization;
• The ability to contact customers via chat, email, voice, and now text and social;
• AI-powered voice and chat bots that can answer easy questions and route tricky ones to contact center agents, with all the related background served up so customers won't have to repeat themselves; and
• An integration with Webex Experience Management for sentiment analysis.

"Cisco's purpose is to power an inclusive future, and collaboration technology plays a critical role in leveling the playing field so everyone is able to participate in the global economy regardless of geography, language, and personality type. This is why we are driven to deliver a Webex experience that is 10 times better than in-person, and at the same time make in-person interactions 10 times better too," said Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager of security and applications at Cisco. "Webex enables a shift toward hybrid working and less reliance on geography-based hiring, opening the global economy and giving everyone a seat at the table—no matter where the table is. Our team is passionate about delivering this vision, which fuels every device we build, every line of code we write, and every feature we create."