Cisco Announces Webex Assistant for Meetings
Webex Assistant for Meetings, Cisco’s cognitive collaboration solution to be released in March 2020, fuses Webex with Cisco’s acquisition Voicea. This solution will offer advanced speech recognition to enable a wide range of capabilities.
Key capabilities will include:
- Voice commands
- Speaker identification
- Transcription
- Identification of meeting highlights and insights
- Searchability for meeting information
- Availability in Spanish
Source: SoftwareReviews, Cisco Webex Meetings Product Scorecard, Accessed February 7, 2020.
Our Take
The capabilities of Cisco’s Webex Assistant for Meetings are all excellent additions to the Cisco ecosystem, especially for sales teams. Identifying meeting highlights and insights is of particular use, saving the end user from needing to trawl back through an entire call transcript. Of course, as always, the question is how effective will this capability be. Will the right highlight or insight be selected? Can the Webex Assistant filter through different speech acts, purpose, and accents to ensure proper highlight and insight selection?
Furthermore, it is not completely clear what Cisco will do with best-of-breed apps that currently integrate into its system that cover the same capabilities as the Webex Assistant. Gong, in particular, will be a major competitor to the Webex Assistant – but will Cisco allow its users to continue their use of Gong over the Webex Assistant? These questions have yet to be answered.
Consequently, Cisco users thinking of buying in to Gong, or a similar best-of-breed app, should be wary of whether Cisco will continue to allow integration of these apps with its ecosystem. Indeed, given that Cisco Webex Meetings is ranked first in the category of Web Conferencing in SoftwareReviews, Cisco may think twice about being interoperable with its competitors in this area.
Want to Know More?
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