- The company plans to introduce AI features during video calls.
- Cisco also plans to use AI to determine the facial expressions of the participants of the video call.
Introduction:
The examples include engagement insights similar to how often you had a video on or showed up on time and the people or teams in the organization that you speak with most often.
Statement from Vice President at Webex:
According to vice president Jeetu Patel, the goal is to make video calls enhanced for people in the hybrid world. Search people work within in-person meetings in the office and virtual meetings from home. The tricky issue is the consideration of useful information is useful for an individual to know while not raising concern that Webex is for instance notifying managers to employees who are regularly late in the meetings.
“Let’s say you did 12 meetings today, and in six of those meetings with four people or fewer, you spoke for 90% of the time. That would be a really bad thing to give your boss, but a really good thing for you to have so you can say, ‘Oh, I should probably do a better job listening,’” he said. “The privacy on that front is not at the organizational level. It’s at the individual level. So when we provide insights like that to an individual, the individual owns the data, not the organization, because we don’t believe that without your explicit permission, you’d want to have your boss see that.”
Introduction of AI features:
WebEx introduced a list of new features in recent months where some are powered by artificial intelligence. It will change how people share information through video calls. Patel said, toward this end, “We’ve probably invested about a billion dollars or so in the past two years in AI.”
Gesture recognition in video calls means that people can raise their hand to ask to speak or show a feedback response by thumbs up or thumbs down. Another ai-powered feature will crop the faces of people attending in-person meetings for people working remotely.
“Even though there are three people sitting in a conference room, we’ll actually break the stream into three separate boxes and show it to you, and our hardware will actually do that,” Patel said.
Patel oversees the acquisition of three companies and has been doing that since he joined Cisco last summer after he served as chief product officer at Box. Cisco closed an acquisition of IMImobile last month $730 million to include more AI capabilities.
Plans of Cisco
Cisco announced plans to acquire BabbleLabs last summer. It is an AI startup focused on the audio filter processes. to show the sound of someone doing dishes or other background noise can be eliminated. Earlier this year Cisco acquired Slido which makes engagement features for video calls like word clouds and upvoted questions. Such features allow the meeting to take the structure of a town hall with transparency around the top questions for employees within an organization since everyone can see the posted questions.
Statement from VP of Cisco, Jeetu Patel:
But Patel acknowledged that there are no limits to how far the technology should be able to go. “Engagement should not be measured based on having a judgment on someone saying, ‘I’m judging that you look sad, and therefore I’m going to do certain things’ … at that point in time in my mind, you could cross a boundary where there’s more bad that can come out of that than good,” he said.
Cisco acquired Voicea, in 2019, to power speech-to-text transcription of the meetings. Closed captioning and live translation are also some features with Webex calls. It is a huge challenge to decide where to differentiate the line on which AI power features should be introduced in a video call. Earlier this year Microsoft Research studied with AffectiveSpotlight on AI to recognize confusion engagement and head nods in meetings.
Video analysis of expression can come with a lot of shortcomings. A group of journalists in Germany demonstrated that placing a bookshelf in the background or putting on glasses can change the evaluation of a person during the video call. It should not matter if a person is extra what your preferred to stay silent in the group settings as long as they fulfill their job duties. Monitoring such cuts raises the question of consent.
“There’s a fine line between ‘This is super productive’ and ‘We can’t do this because it violates my privacy or it’s just outright creepy,’” Patel said.
